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- Hacker News
- A real shame it's not a crewed spacecraft - would be nice to have crewed access to GEO...
Robots get the best jobs...
by rbanffy - No mention of OSAM-1, $2 billion NASA mission cancelled due to delays, and likely due to this mission beating it to launch.by sivex
- wait that reminds me, what happened with the SWIFT rescue attempt recently to lift it into a higher orbit?
* https://science.nasa.gov/mission/swift/swift-boost-mission/
by ck2 - They should be close to the end of the checkout stage, then it'll take 4 weeks to get in the right orbit and another 2 weeks of inspection ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_boost_mission#Boost_oper... has an easier all-in-one-place timeline than the NASA pages.)by eichin
- > Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the RSGS payload is designed and developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). The payload is integrated on the Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV) spacecraft, developed by SpaceLogitistics, a Northrop Grumman company, and was launched onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
That's quite a who's who of public-private partnership. It's fascinating to watch these commercial space industries develop in real-time.
by petcat - TIL DARPA is still around. Kind of thought they got the “doge” treatmentby ramgine
- Almost all the ‘servicing’ and ‘orbital debris cleanup’ robot-arm sats are funded quite heavily by military end users, because there is really no market for their stated aims and a huge market for the unstated aims - flying up to an adversary’s satellite and messing it up. Open secret in the industry.by ballooney
- Woah dual robot arms with tools on it! I have past experience using a CNC machine and I to this day remember how laborious it was to edit g-code and try to fine tune it. I cannot imagine the amount of work it would take to do that for something in space and on a robot arm. That is awesome.
- It's not exactly the first, this is the first (unclassified, that we know about) satellite to go up and grapple a satellite in geostationary and provide stationkeeping functions for it, which did so back in 2020:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Extension_Vehicle
This is all very novel because in the relatively long history of humans sticking stuff in geostationary orbit, not once until 2020 had any sort of mission gone out to geostationary and intentionally grappled or docked with another satellite.
by walrus01 - The multi-purpose robotic manipulation makes this a bit more advanced and experimental than the dedicated MEV attachment, as useful and performant as the MEV has been. China also demonstrated robotic grappling and towing in GEO in 2021. A few other US and European experimental robotic servicing missions in the pipeline, involving both Active Debris Removal grappling and robotic arms playing with designated payloads and attachment interfaces, but mostly planned for LEO.
There's a tendency for such experimental servicing missions (e.g DARPA Orbital Express) to take place in lower orbits, along with all the crewed space station docking and shuttle servicing missions. LEO is cheaper for servicing demonstrations, more human-friendly and also where the Hubble Space Telescope that took a fair bit of servicing happens to be based. But for the robotics, sufficiently advanced autonomy for the latency not to be a major issue is also important.
by notahacker - I'm the lead roboticist. Within bounds, I can answer questions.
- sure seems like this could just as easily be used to perform on-orbit disassembly of a hostile nation's satellite?by sidewndr46
- What is your story, how did you get into robotics? Was it your first choice?by iagooar
- Can you tell us what is out of bounds, so we know not to ask those questions? :)
- How could this be applied to grab old satellites (of which there are, to put in in technical terms, "too damn many") out of orbit and bring them back to Earth for processing? Seems like some of the technology could be used to recycle space junk.by lenerdenator
- Would this be able to boost Hubble or replace it's gyros? Does the satellite servicer need its targets to be constructed to some common standards, or is the new capability now leading to common standards? Was it built with a method for itself accepting refueling?
It seems to me this device would lead to a revision in satellite reliability design and life calculations.
by electroweak - Is there a paper somewhere describing the intended robotic operations and robotic toolkit it's equipped with (beyond the MEPs, though they're pretty interesting too)?
(context: some of my colleagues and consortium partners are working on European projects involving end effector toolkits for orbital [dis]assembly and slot-based electric propulsion ORUs respectively. Would love to chat but suspect you're pretty busy!)
Congratulations on the launch.
by notahacker - What sort of interesting actuators are used that people might not commonly think of? (I'm thinking of interesting solutions like the JWST's mirror actuators [0].)
0. https://hackaday.com/2022/02/08/working-model-reveals-amazin...
by adolph - It sounds like each "MEP" (mission extension pod) once attached is its own fully autonomous satellite? How big is each MEP? Like, a mini fridge?
Since the mission is designed to attach one and then leave to go to another satellite that needs servicing?
by walrus01