After 10 months in orbit, the Starling spacecraft swarm successfully demonstrated its primary mission's key objectives, representing significant achievements in the capability of swarm configurations.

Swarms of satellites may one day be used in deep space exploration. An autonomous network of spacecraft could self-navigate, manage scientific experiments, and execute maneuvers to respond to environmental changes without the burden of significant communications delays between the swarm and Earth.

"The success of Starling's initial mission represents a landmark achievement in the development of autonomous networks of small spacecraft," said Roger Hunter, program manager for NASA's Small Spacecraft Technology program at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "The team has been very successful in achieving our objectives and adapting in the face of challenges.

As humanity returns to the moon in the next few years, they're going to need water to survive. While resupplies from Earth would work for a time, eventually the lunar base would have to become self-sustaining? So, how much water would be required to make this happen?

This is what a study recently posted to the arXiv preprint server hopes to address as a team of researchers from Baylor University explored water management scenarios for a self-sustaining moonbase, including the appropriate location of the base and how the water would be extracted and treated for safe consumption using appropriate personnel.

Here, Universe Today discusses this research with Dr. Jeffrey Lee, who is an assistant adjunct professor in the Center for Astrophysics, Space Physics & Engineering Research at Baylor University, and lead author of the study, regarding the motivation behind the study, significant results, the importance of having a self-sustaining moonbase, and what implications this study could have for the upcoming Artemis missions.