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DARPA Developing 'Droid' Satellites

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the take-me-to-your-gallon dept.

eliot1785 writes "DARPA is now developing a new breed of satellites that can be precision-maneuvered in unison and easily perform advanced operations with built-in sensors, computers and thrusters. From the article: 'David Miller, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Space Systems Laboratory, says such satellites might be used for such tasks as building giant space telescopes and closely monitoring Earth. The shuttle Discovery last week delivered the second of three satellite test "droids" that are undergoing experiments at the International Space Station.'"

3 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds Like An Nice Advance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    With this technology, rogue nations and other terrorist organizations can't time and wait for our spy satellites to pass by and not have their nefarious schemes being watched.

    Hopefully this will also speed up the time the intelligence agencies can spy on a place when a crisis or situation occurs.

  2. Re:the obvious use by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You forgot the even more obvious one. Harder to destroy since having a cloud of thousands of them could be considerably harder to take out than a few big satellites.

  3. Droids? by ScaryFroMan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How are these droids? 'Droid is short for Android, as in a human-shaped robot. And while this definition may not hold fast in a galaxy far, far away, it most definately does for us. Why not just say "Robot?"

    --
    In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.