First Robotic Satellite Servicer Launched

First Robotic Satellite Servicer Launched(nrl.navy.mil)

58 points by GlenTheMachine 4 days ago | 29 comments

walrus01 3 hours ago |

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.

notahacker 2 hours ago | |

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.

walrus01 2 hours ago | | |

The new robot grappler arm definitely seems like an advancement on previous designs. The MEV was, as I recall, designed to mate with only a specific set of models of geostationary satellite bus and, for lack of a better term, ram a probe up its backside to grab onto it.

the probe ramming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJZ3xmuom0M

One of the things that people who don't pay attention to space based infrastructure find odd, if you tell them, is that in the entire history of manned spaceflight no human has ever gone to geostationary orbit.

GlenTheMachine 2 hours ago |

I'm the lead roboticist. Within bounds, I can answer questions.

walrus01 1 hour ago | |

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?

GlenTheMachine 1 hour ago | | |

Sort of mini-fridge sized. They take over attitude control and propulsion for satellites that are low on fuel.

"Since the mission is designed to attach one and then leave to go to another satellite that needs servicing?"

Yes.

sidewndr46 1 hour ago | |

sure seems like this could just as easily be used to perform on-orbit disassembly of a hostile nation's satellite?

aqfamnzc 8 minutes ago | | |

I would think there are much less expensive and more rapid methods of "on-orbit disassembly" than a system like this?

bespokedevelopr 38 minutes ago | | |

Yes, China demonstrated this capability a couple year ago with towing a geo sat to a different orbit. It only makes sense to go tit-for-tat on these capabilities for servicing and the unspoken offensive ability.

https://spacenews.com/chinas-orbital-maneuvers-blur-the-line...

adolph 31 minutes ago | |

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...

GlenTheMachine 7 minutes ago | | |

We use pretty standard BLDCs.

redbridgerock 4 hours ago |

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.

petcat 5 hours ago |

> 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.

ballooney 5 hours ago | |

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.

walrus01 2 hours ago | | |

Presumably it's also known to everyone who builds/operates these that having a foreign nation's military satellite intentionally approach your own geostationary satellite to within a very short distance, as the vast area up there goes, is a very thinly veiled threat or demonstration of capability.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=russian+s...

Outside of GEO, nobody in the public really knows what the X-37 does when it's in orbit, but one of the theories I have seen thrown around is that it's capable of approaching and inspecting other things in LEO, or theoretically even grabbing or manipulating one in some way.

cameron_b 4 hours ago | | |

As I understand it, the current on-orbit service functions include... orbit manipulations.

Any service functions of existing equipment would depend on charge interface or communications functions that are not exposed or standardized.

It will make a good season to practice kinetic adjustments until the fleets start shipping terminals for Astromech droids.

ramgine 5 hours ago | |

TIL DARPA is still around. Kind of thought they got the “doge” treatment

wrs 3 hours ago | | |

But why isn’t it called WARPA now?

petcat 4 hours ago | | |

DOGE got DOGE'd itself. It doesn't exist anymore.

pennomi 4 hours ago | | |

Defense doesn’t get DOGE’d, only programs that build up communities do. There’s always budget for more destruction.

rbanffy 2 hours ago |

A real shame it's not a crewed spacecraft - would be nice to have crewed access to GEO...

Robots get the best jobs...

sivex 3 hours ago |

No mention of OSAM-1, $2 billion NASA mission cancelled due to delays, and likely due to this mission beating it to launch.

ck2 3 hours ago |

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/

* https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/

eichin 2 hours ago | |

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.)