Michael Rubenstein Selected for NIAC Fellowship

Northwestern Engineering’s Michael Rubenstein has been selected as a 2026 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) fellow.

Rubenstein, an associate professor of computer science and of mechanical engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering, will develop the concept of satellite swarms to explore the rings of Saturn. Rubenstein’s NIAC project: “Actively Steerable Femtosat Constellation for In-Situ Exploration of Saturn’s Rings, Atmosphere, and Magnetosphere,” investigates the use of thousands of miniature femtosatellites deployed in ring-crossing orbits around Saturn.

Rather than relying on a single large spacecraft, the mission distributes sensing and data collection across a vast swarm, enabling measurements of ring structure, atmospheric conditions, and magnetospheric interactions over unprecedented spatial and temporal scales. Importantly, by leveraging the inherent fault tolerance of large-scale satellite swarms, the mission can directly cross through Saturn’s rings and operate in environments that would pose significant risks to conventional spacecraft, accepting the loss of individual femtosatellites while preserving overall mission capability.

This approach could provide new insights into the origin and evolution of Saturn’s rings while demonstrating a resilient and scalable architecture for future space exploration missions.

“Traditional planetary missions rely on a single, highly capable spacecraft, which means that even scientifically compelling missions cannot proceed if the risk of failure is too high.” Rubenstein said. “By deploying 10,000 coordinated miniature satellites, this system opens possibilities for high-risk missions like directly crossing through Saturn’s rings. NIAC provides an opportunity to investigate whether this type of distributed exploration could enable new scientific discoveries that would otherwise be impossible.”

The NIAC program seeks innovations from diverse and non-traditional sources, and NIAC projects study innovative, technically credible, advanced concepts that could one day “change the possible” in aerospace.

Rubenstein’s research focuses on advancing the control and design of multi-robot systems, enabling them to tackle tasks that are difficult or impractical for traditional single-robot approaches. Compared with individual robots, multi-robot systems can provide greater parallelism, adaptability, and fault tolerance.

His work also explores how emerging technologies influence the design of multi-robot algorithms as these systems scale to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of robots.