Starburst: The Space-Based Structure Meant to Help Us Spy on Storms From Birth to Death

Storms come in many shapes and sizes, and are described as violent disturbances of the atmosphere, manifested through high winds, rain, lightning and thunder, snow, sand, and pretty much everything you can think of.

For a long time, humans have been at the elements’ mercy and had little to no warning of approaching storms. That changed, of course, once technology progressed enough, and we now generally have the means to know, with a decent amount of time to spare, when and where a storm would hit, and how bad it'll probably be.

Some of the most important assets in allowing us to know that are satellites, space-based pieces of hardware that can look down from their vantage points and assess everything that is to assess about storms. But even satellites have their limitations, and some of the biggest ones have to do with the fact that they generally measure storms one frame at a time, showing us just a glimpse at a particular moment in time, and not the storm’s entire life cycle.

Jonathan Sauder from NASA’s JPL believes that, if we are to better predict weather and storms, we’d need something that can keep an eye on storms “across time over its entire lifecycle, from water vapor to heavy precipitation.” And that’s why he’s proposing something called the Starburst as support for more detailed observations.

Starburst is one of the many ideas NASA recognized with an Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant at the beginning of the year, thus in some sense officially backed by the space agency. It is, in essence, a structure meant to support a constellation of satellites, possibly the small and affordable, cube-shaped SmallSats, operating on a broad multi-frequency (10 GHz to 600 GHz), and giving us a closer look at storms.

Supposed to be able to get images of the storms with a resolution of 25 km (15.5 miles), the satellites, which can cluster together in groups of anywhere between five and 100, would have to deploy antennas much larger than themselves. As it stands, there is no tech currently available capable of supporting such a deployment of the tech.

And this is where the Starburst comes in, as a means to make the deployment of said large antennas in orbit possible. The deployable structure features something called kinematic mounts, which should allow “highly accurate deployments” of the antennas. It also uses high-strain composite rods to get to an over-expanded state, and cables to be pulled into position.

Although envisioned as a tool to make weather satellites more capable, the Starburst is modular and adaptable, and that could make it suitable for use as a base for a wide range of space-based technologies, including apertures, booms, telescopes and solar arrays.

According to the man who dreamed this thing up, the Starburst “would usher in a new era of deployables, changing the possible for astrophysics, exploration, and even interstellar mission concepts which require deployables.” We’re told any stowed configuration of the hardware would be easily deployed in “nearly any desired shape.”

Starburst is at the time of writing just an idea on a piece of paper, but Jonathan Sauder means to make something of this and has already announced plans for a study of the mission concept, the development of a small-scale early prototype, and the designing of the crucial kinematic mount to prove deployment repeatability.