Mitsubishi Electric Corporation has been granted a U.S. patent directed to managing a large satellite constellation so that its satellites do not run into one another where their orbital planes cross. The patent, US12662256B2, titled "Mega-constellation business device," issued on 23 June 2026 and names a single inventor, Hisayuki Mukae. As a granted patent its claims have been examined and allowed — what follows reads the controlling claim as issued, not an abstract or a press summary, and treats the grant as a statement of allowed scope rather than evidence of a fielded system.

The core idea the patent claims is a coordination problem dressed as a device. A constellation of 100 or more satellites is spread across many orbital planes; wherever two planes intersect, the satellites flying in them can arrive at the crossing point at the same time. The claimed device avoids that by managing two levers — where a plane sits (its orbital altitude) and when a satellite passes (its passage timing) — so that the satellites are never at the intersection together. The abstract states the principle plainly: the system "continues providing the service while avoiding a collision between satellites by both or one of control of an orbital altitude and control of a passage timing of a satellite group flying in a region where the plurality of orbital planes intersect."

What claim 1 actually covers

The independent claim is narrower and more specific than the abstract, and the specifics are where the scope lives. Claim 1 is to a "mega-constellation business device to manage a satellite constellation composed of 100 or more satellites." That device includes a space traffic management device that is compatible with the equivalent space-traffic-management devices in other operators' business devices, and circuitry that connects — through that management device — to a wider space traffic management system in which the operators' devices are linked over a communication line. In other words, the claim is not just to a single operator controlling its own satellites; it is to an operator's controller built to interoperate with rival or neighbouring operators' controllers across a shared network.

A mega-constellation business device to manage a satellite constellation composed of 100 or more satellites... wherein the space traffic management device includes at least space traffic management rule information including international phase rules corresponding to internationally acknowledged satellites, trial-phase rules corresponding to satellites that are not internationally acknowledged, and flight safety measure information to cause a plurality of satellites flying in a same orbital plane at a same nominal altitude to fly evenly spaced apart while maintaining a relative phase angle to avoid collision.— Mega-constellation business device, US12662256B2

Three elements in that language do the work. First, the device must carry rule information that distinguishes "international phase rules" for internationally acknowledged satellites from "trial-phase rules" for satellites that are not yet acknowledged — a coordination layer that treats recognised and provisional traffic differently. Second, it must carry flight-safety measure information that keeps satellites in the same orbital plane and at the same nominal altitude evenly spaced while holding a fixed relative phase angle — the intra-plane discipline that prevents satellites in one ring from bunching. Third, the whole thing is defined as interoperable: the management device is "compatible with" the management devices of other operators and connects to them over a communication line. Read together, the controlling claim is directed to a networked, rules-carrying coordination device, not merely to a maneuver algorithm.

The dependent claims fill in the mechanism. Claim 3 adds a flight-safety measure of "eliminating an intersection of orbits so as to secure passive safety" for a satellite group at the same nominal altitude — designing the geometry so the planes do not cross at all. Claim 5 introduces "intra-orbital-plane synchronous control information," "passage timing management information," and "collision avoidance action plan information" agreed with operators of satellites in the same plane, at the same altitude, or in a neighbouring region. Claims 4 and 5 also enumerate specific congested regions — sun-synchronous orbits near local solar times of 10:30, 13:30, 06:00 and 18:00 at altitudes of 500 km to 1000 km, and high-latitude bands above 80 degrees north and south — that a deorbiting satellite must clear or coordinate through. Those numbers are the claim's way of naming the real estate where low-Earth-orbit traffic concentrates.

Where the grant lands in the patent landscape

The classification places the patent squarely in cosmonautics. Its CPC tags are B64G 1/1085 — the subclass for constellations and arrangements of cooperating satellites — together with B64G 1/2423 and B64G 1/2429 (attitude or orbit control), B64G 1/244 (control by spinning or thrust), and H04B 7/18519 on the communications side for satellite systems. The B64G 1/1085 anchor is the tell: this is constellation-architecture IP, filed where an examiner searching the cooperating-satellite art would find it, with the orbit-control and inter-satellite-communication subclasses attached because the claimed device acts through both maneuvering and messaging.

What makes the grant legible is that it does not stand alone in the assignee's record — it is the issued centrepiece of an unusually coherent portfolio, all from the same inventor. Mitsubishi Electric holds a granted satellite-constellation forming system that arranges orbital-plane altitude differences in a sinusoidal pattern, and a companion forming system built on elliptical orbits with evenly spaced major-axis angles — both classified, like the new grant, in B64G 1/1085. A granted forming system that synchronises propulsion across an orbital plane describes satellites accelerating and decelerating in lockstep, plane by plane, with a delay between adjacent planes — a concrete realisation of the pass-timing control the new patent claims at a higher level.

The same record reaches into the harder edges of constellation operations. A granted deorbit-and-debris system gradually shifts a plane's altitude while keeping satellite passage timings from coinciding at an intersection neighbourhood point — the exact collision geometry the hero claim addresses. A more recent constellation-maintaining method widens the relative angle between adjacent planes to open a free corridor through which a deorbiting satellite can descend, and a granted space-traffic-management and debris-removal system links the management devices of multiple operators and a debris-removal operator over a communication line — the multi-operator network that claim 1 of the new patent presupposes. On the contested-environment side, a granted jamming-satellite avoidance method changes per-plane altitude to evade a satellite mimicking the constellation's nominal orbit. And a granted collision-avoidance assistance device decides which space object should perform an avoidance maneuver when a dangerous conjunction is forecast.

Two caveats keep this brief inside the record. A granted patent establishes allowed claim scope; it does not establish that Mitsubishi Electric operates a 100-satellite constellation, and several of the related grants describe methods and architectures rather than fielded hardware. And the cluster, deep as it is, traces to a single named inventor and assignee — it documents one company's filing strategy in cooperating-satellite and space-traffic-management IP, not the state of the broader field. Space publication volume keyed to this grant drop was thin, so this brief is anchored on the genuine B64G hero of the 23 June issue and widened across Mitsubishi Electric's granted record in the same B64G 1/1085 neighbourhood to place the claim in its classification and portfolio context. What the new grant adds to the public picture is precise: an issued, examined claim to a networked mega-constellation manager that avoids collisions at orbital-plane crossings by staging altitude and pass timing, and that is built to interoperate with other operators' controllers across a shared communication line.