Orbiting robots could help fix and fuel satellites in space

For greater than 20 years, the Landsat 7 satellite tv for pc circled Earth each 99 minutes or so, capturing photos of virtually all of the planet’s floor every 16 days. One among many craft that noticed the altering globe, it revealed melting glaciers in Greenland, the expansion of shrimp farms in Mexico, and the extent of deforestation in Papua New Guinea. However after Landsat 7 ran brief on gasoline, its helpful life successfully ended. In house, common servicing has not been an choice.

Now, although, NASA has a possible repair for such enfeebled satellites. In a number of years, the company plans to launch a robotic into orbit and maneuver it to inside grabbing distance of Landsat 7. The robotic will use a mechanical arm to catch maintain of it and refuel it, mid-air.

If profitable, the mission would mark a milestone—the primary time a satellite tv for pc could be refueled in house. And this mission is only one of quite a few deliberate private and non-private ventures supposed to make use of robots to restore and enhance the billions of {dollars}’ value of satellites in orbit.

Ultimately, efforts like these may result in higher and cheaper satellites that decrease the price of Web and cellphone networks, present higher climate forecasts and provides unprecedented views of planetary change and of the Universe. They may even allow a brand new wave of in-orbit development, with armies of robots constructing satellites, house stations, and even Mars-bound spaceships.

Giving satellites longer lives

In the intervening time there are about 4,852 working satellites in orbit, taking part in essential roles in communications, distant sensing, and different duties. Nearly all have been launched with the information that if something broke there was no method of fixing it. Most satellites additionally want gasoline to often modify their orbits. As soon as that’s gone they could turn into a lot house junk, including to the already substantial stream of particles encircling the globe.

“Think about you’re going to go purchase a automotive tomorrow,” says Brian Weeden, head of an business group referred to as the Consortium for Execution of Rendezvous and Servicing Operations (CONFERS). “And it’s a must to remember the fact that you’re by no means going to have the ability to put extra gasoline in it. You’ll be able to by no means change the oil. You’ll be able to by no means preserve or repair something. And it’s a must to use it for the subsequent 10 years. Now, how costly and the way difficult do you assume that automotive goes to be? That’s precisely what we have now been doing with satellites.”

To maintain satellites working so long as attainable, engineers construct in redundant programs and pack in as a lot gasoline as they’ll match. All this over-engineering provides to the prices of constructing and launching the satellites—a contemporary communications satellite tv for pc can price about $500 million.

Nearly all development and restore that has occurred in house up to now has relied a minimum of partially on astronauts, together with fixes on the Hubble House Telescope and development of the Worldwide House Station. However sending people into house is tremendously costly, so the hassle to develop robots to do the job has grown lately.

“What we would love to do is have a way of getting a robotic mechanic in house that may repair satellites once they break,” says Carl Glen Henshaw, head of the robotics and machine studying part on the US Naval Analysis Laboratory.