Formation Autonomy Spacecraft with Thrust, Relnav, Attitude and Crosslink (or FASTRAC) is a pair of nanosatellites (respectively named Sara-Lily and Emma) developed and built by students at The University of Texas at Austin.

The project is part of a program sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), whose goal is to lead the development of affordable space technology.

Due to the high cost of lifting mass into orbit, there is a strong initiative to miniaturize the overall weight of spacecraft.

The spacecraft were expected to demonstrate Global Positioning System relative navigation and micro-charge thruster performance.

The main mission sequence is composed of six distinct phases: Launch, Launch Vehicle Separation, Initial Acquisition, GPS Onboard Relative Navigation, Onboard Single Antenna GPS Attitude Determination and Micro-discharge Plasma Thruster Operation, and Amateur Radio Operations.

They will be transported to a 72 degree inclination circular low Earth orbit with an altitude of 650 km by a Minotaur IV rocket.

During this phase the ground station will attempt to establish first contact with the satellites and perform a check out procedure to make sure all the subsystems on board are working correctly.

The satellites will then exchange GPS data through this cross-link in order to calculate on-orbit real time relative navigation solutions.

The final phase of the mission will start once the communication architecture of the satellites is reconfigured from the ground to work with the Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) network.

The command & data handling (C&DH) system is composed by four distributed AVRs which were developed by Santa Clara University.

Each satellite will have redundant ORION GPS receivers, dual cross-strapped antennas with RF switching and splitting hardware.

The battery box is made from black anodized aluminum and holds 10 Sanyo N4000-DRL D-cells provided to the team by AFRL.

The thruster channels and superheats an inert gas through a micro-channel nozzle producing a micro-Newton level of thrust.