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NASA Awards $127 Million Contract For Refueling Mission Spacecraft (gizmodo.com)
Satellites cost millions of dollars to be launched into space and there's no guarantee that they will work without electrical or mechanical problems once in orbit. NASA has recently announced that it will award a $127 million contract to a company that aims to use a robotic spacecraft to fix satellites in space, thus potentially saving millions of dollars in the long-run by fixing satellites that would otherwise be "expensive e-waste." Gizmodo reports: NASA has just announced that it will award a $127 million contract to the California-based satellite company Space Systems/Loral for Restore-L, a robotic spacecraft capable of grasping, refueling and relocating a satellite in low Earth orbit, in addition to testing technologies for future missions. SSL has three years to build the bot, which is projected to launch in 2020. Without the ability to refuel, a satellite's lifespan is restricted by the amount of propellant engineers can pack in its tank at launch. That lifespan can be cut even shorter should the spacecraft encounter any electrical or mechanical problems on orbit. As more and more satellites reach the end of their operational lifespans, government agencies and private companies have been working to remedy this problem by developing robots that can give satellites a tune-up in zero-gravity. DARPA, for instance, recently launched a program aimed at designing robots capable of servicing satellites at the hard-to-reach but highly-desirable perch of geosynchronous orbit, 22,000 miles above Earth. NASA's Satellite Servicing Division, meanwhile, has a handful of on-orbit repair and refueling technology demonstrators in the works, including a robotic arm with the same range of motion as a human arm, a navigation system designed to help robots rendezvous with moving objects in space, and Restore-L, which combines these and other capabilities into a multi-purpose space mechanic. For now, Restore-L's primary goal is to refuel Landsat 7, a critical Earth-monitoring satellite operated by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. If successful, the spacecraft may be modified for all sorts of other useful tasks, from mopping up the ever-growing halo of space junk encircling our planet, to servicing exciting new science missions like the Asteroid Redirect Mission, which will grab a multi-ton boulder from the surface of an asteroid and tow it back to orbit around the Moon.
Slightly off topic, but now that we have self driving cars, that rely on GPS satellites (or Glosnass) how do they handle fake GPS data?
i.e. when the controller of the satellite system deliberately reports false satellite location results to fuck up the calculated GPS position?
Would the car drive us off a cliff?
Currently there are two systems, one controlled by Putin, and one controlled by Putin fanbois, and really I don't trust either with my life.
How much are they really saving? Wouldn't it be a similar cost to just launch a new satellite than it would be to launch a larger servicing/refueling craft?
All okay?
What if Restore-L breaks down? And then the Restore-L they send to repair Restore-L breaks down?
Or what if it gets out there, goes crazy, and starts destroying satellites willy-nilly?
#DeleteChrome
Well, we do need a good OTV (Orbital Transfer Vehicle). You could use it to move stuff from orbit to orbit as needed.
So, how much fuel is this robot going to have on board? How or why would you refuel it?
The reason you put tiny fuel tanks on satellites is that it cost a lot to launch anything on a rocket. If it didn't then the engineers would put huge tanks on things sitting in orbit. Tanks designed to last as long as the next part expected to fail.
At there aren't that many kinds of propellant in use but you'd still be out of luck if you had something using hydrazine while the only thing left on the repair 'bot is nitrogen.
Orbital transfers aren't free or cheap (ask any Kerbel Space fan.) It will be interesting to see what propulsion system is proposed. There's interest in tethers for 'propelentless station keeping or orbital transfers.
Would you send up refuel cans for the robot? Would you de-orbit the robot once it ran out of fuel? Could you recover the robot to save costs, then?
Except for the Hubble Space Telescope most satellites are not designed to be serviced. What can a hypothetical servicing robot do about dead batteries or shorted out control systems or hole solar arrays on the existing fleet in orbit?
Finally, while space is pretty big, sending something on a 'soft' collision course with a dead satellite in the prime geosync orbit sounds like a great way to create more debris just where you don't want it. But it's Loral. They will have the best people Congressional pork spending can buy on staff to ask and answer these questions.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
Back in the 1970s one of the selling points/excuses for giving up on the Saturn V etc and going for the Space Shuttle was that it could be used to refuel satellites and do repair on them - which did happen with spectacular success with the Hubble telescope. One of several major reasons that such missions were very rare is that the Space Shuttle was limited to doing missions in low earth orbit and it's a very long way to geostationary orbit from there.
A robot craft could potentially get to that distant orbit and could have a mission time far longer than the Space Shuttle ever had. Also such a mission is incredibly dangerous - if the speeds are not very closely matched the impact energy would be enormous. Accidents will happen and it's better to lose a robot and a satellite than a manned mission.
Make the space people pay for it!
... for Space X / Elon Musk?
Why is this even on slashdot?
From what I understand quite a few satellites don't utilize the full payload capacity of their launcher, why not attach such a unit BEFORE launch to all decent sized satellites? Maybe rig it so that it is detachable so that if its parent satellite is in good condition but a neighboring one is failing the unit can detach and go service that satellite.
So it will only run us $127 Million for a Robot capable of making repairs to Satellites but it costs $4 Billion for AirForce 1 ???
are satellites even designed to be maintained in space?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The satellites should have enough fuel aboard after deployment to maintain a stable low Earth orbit through their anticipated lifespan. Let's remember, these are technologically advanced devices which operate throughout their lifespan in the harshest environmental conditions we can reach. There are a great many satellites still in stable orbit which have been rendered inoperative through extended exposure to radiation (in space, no one can hear you burn/freeze/be irradiated). EOL is EOL, and while it may be possible to kludge some extra life out old equipment, it's still obsolete equipment subject to multiple modes of failure - not just unplanned deorbiting.
LOL!
More than likely a stealth satellite killer which can move from one to another planting remotely triggered destructive devices.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!