9. Conclusion

An emerging trend across the globe is to have missions involving many small, distributed, and largely inexpensive satellites flying in formation to achieve a common objective. The advantages of satellite formation flying can be summarized as (i) higher redundancy and improved fault tolerance, (ii) on-orbit reconfiguration within the formation (which offers multi-mission capability and design flexibility), (iii) lower individual launch mass in case of small satellite missions, typically leading to reduced launch cost and increased launch flexibility, and (iv) minimal financial loss in case of failures both during launch as well as operation. Satellite formation flying enables new application areas such as spar antenna arrays for remote sensing, distributed sensing for solar and extra-terrestrial observatories, interferometry synthetic aperture radar, and many more. Also a variety of interesting and useful applications are possible in satellite formation flying, both as a substitute to single large satellite missions as well as the ones unique to formation flying missions.