NASA believes that there's strength in numbers.

The proof is it's preparing a group of low-cost satellites for liftoff from Hawaii as part of its Edison Demonstration of Smallsat Networks (EDSN) mission. The goal of the project is to show how a cluster of eight tissue box-sized satellites can ride into the Earth's orbit, capable of collecting multipoint science data while transferring information to the ground.

"The idea behind EDSN is to demonstrate the capability of using a swarm of low-cost satellites to do a science mission," Andrew Petro, program executive for NASA's Small Spacecraft Technology Program (SSTP), said in a NASA statement. "We are once again using commercial, off-the-shelf electronics as the core of a satellite that has the ability to do a science mission."
Each nanosatellite weighs about four pounds without any onboard propulsion, as they're able to drift apart naturally. The satellites will be able to communicate with each other and share data from their instruments that count charged particle events in low orbit. In addition, the project has a tracking station set up to collect data from the satellites over the course of a few months.

Roger Hunter, the SSTP manager at Ames satellite specialists, says this experiment will be crucial to future NASA missions and what kinds of data it's able to retrieve.

"What we learn from EDSN will enable future NASA missions," Hunter said. "This will be the first demonstration of a 'swarm' of networked nanosatellites. We can easily envision constellations of nanosatellites in the future focused on various scientific missions in earth sciences, heliophysics, planetary sciences, and astrophysics."

Adds Petro: "But what we learn on EDSN could be applied to Earth science missions, too. You can imagine having an informal network of receivers collecting this information and then just sending packets of data to a common place."