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.
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!)
I grew up in the middle of nowhere Virginia. Like many of you I was a nerd, and I had no outlet for that nerd-dom until I spent all summer working for money to buy a C64. I taught myself assembly, and was a high school intern at NASA Langley where I learned about parallel processing, was introduced to the idea that people would actually pay you money to program computers, and had a tour of their space robotics lab.
When I went to college the guy two doors down from me in the dorm decided he wanted to build a robot, and he recruited me because I knew how to code. We spent freshman year working on a six-legged frame walker which we dreamed would explore Mars someday (this was in the late 1980s, long before the first Mars rover). It didn't work for crap -- the late 1980s were a disaster for makers, we had to source everything from the hardware store or Radio Shack. It was also the most amazing thing I'd ever done, and from then on I was an aspiring space roboticist.
I managed to not fail out, but it was close.
I went to grad school at the University of Maryland's Space Systems Lab under Dave Akin ("Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design"), where I learned control theory and a ton of hands-on skills and got to scuba dive supporting the development of Ranger, which could have been the first US satellite servicer except we could never find a launch for it. I graduated with a PhD in aerospace engineering in 2003, and got hired by NRL, where I worked on RSGS.
I can only provide answers to technical or programmatic questions that have already been "approved for public release" by DARPA and NRL. We've done a number of publicly released presentations over the years, so there is a fair amount of that information in the public domain, but things like the exact algorithms we use for IK or controls, or whatever, hasn't been released yet. I also can't speak about anything that is Northup-Grumman's or SpaceLogistics' intellectual property or is business sensitive, so I can't say which client satellites we'll be servicing.
I'm very hopeful that I'll get a strong technical paper through public release by the end of the year, ant at that point I could provide more detailed technical answers to things a HN audience would be interested in.
It’s all custom flight code. The only software packages we use are basic matrix-vector libraries. Hopefully there will be a paper describing the dynamics/kinematics/controls algorithms soon.
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.
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.
It's almost impossibly hard to return things to earth from GEO. Robert Heinlein famously wrote that "a circular orbit is halfway to anywhere", which means that the most energetically difficult part of a mission to the Andromeda Galaxy is getting out of earth's gravity well.
To get back into earth's gravity well from a circular orbit requires similar amounts of fuel. Getting things back to earth from low earth orbit is doable, if you have a heat shield, because you only have to dump enough velocity to start hitting the atmosphere, and atmospheric drag does the rest of the work.
But that doesn't work at GEO, because you're so high (22,000 miles as opposed to ~1,000 miles for LEO). It's very hard to get enough delta-V (read as "change in velocity", which is basically the amount of fuel you need per unit mass) -- you'd need something with as much fuel as the upper stage of the rocket you were launched on, plus you'd need a heat shield. Alternatively you could use electric propulsion, which takes a lot less fuel, but would also take, literally, a couple of years, during which time you're a hazard to navigation to anything in a lower orbit. Plus, electric thrusters of the size you'd need to do this aren't cheap either.
So we basically never do that. If you need to dispose of a derelict satellite at that altitude, it turns out to be much easier to raise its orbit by a few thousand kilometers.
So, nobody will be recycling space debris that lives at GEO any time soon, unless someone figures out how to do it in situ.
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].)
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
from other sources If I'm reading things right, one estimate of a round trip to mars would be 1000 millisieverts, which is considerable, the maximum allowed annual dose for a US radiation industry worker is 50mSv.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The internet was conceived to be something very different from the web we all know and loathe. Anyway, I think GP was referring to building community centres, schools, libraries, and caring for vulnerable people. Those, it seems, were fully DOGE'd.
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.)
I'm the lead roboticist. Within bounds, I can answer questions.
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.
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.
Thanks! There isn't a paper yet, but I'm working on one; I hope it will be presented at the upcoming iSAIRAS/iSpaRo conference in Cologne.
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?
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.
What is your story, how did you get into robotics? Was it your first choice?
Oh gosh.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere Virginia. Like many of you I was a nerd, and I had no outlet for that nerd-dom until I spent all summer working for money to buy a C64. I taught myself assembly, and was a high school intern at NASA Langley where I learned about parallel processing, was introduced to the idea that people would actually pay you money to program computers, and had a tour of their space robotics lab.
When I went to college the guy two doors down from me in the dorm decided he wanted to build a robot, and he recruited me because I knew how to code. We spent freshman year working on a six-legged frame walker which we dreamed would explore Mars someday (this was in the late 1980s, long before the first Mars rover). It didn't work for crap -- the late 1980s were a disaster for makers, we had to source everything from the hardware store or Radio Shack. It was also the most amazing thing I'd ever done, and from then on I was an aspiring space roboticist.
I managed to not fail out, but it was close.
I went to grad school at the University of Maryland's Space Systems Lab under Dave Akin ("Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design"), where I learned control theory and a ton of hands-on skills and got to scuba dive supporting the development of Ranger, which could have been the first US satellite servicer except we could never find a launch for it. I graduated with a PhD in aerospace engineering in 2003, and got hired by NRL, where I worked on RSGS.
Salute to a real robotics veteran. I can't imagine the hardware gore you have seen.
Pleb here: the very fact you were able to eke a hexapod robot in the late 80s from OTC technology is super impressive.
Just following your dialogue here enforces why I love HN comments x
Can you tell us what is out of bounds, so we know not to ask those questions? :)
I can only provide answers to technical or programmatic questions that have already been "approved for public release" by DARPA and NRL. We've done a number of publicly released presentations over the years, so there is a fair amount of that information in the public domain, but things like the exact algorithms we use for IK or controls, or whatever, hasn't been released yet. I also can't speak about anything that is Northup-Grumman's or SpaceLogistics' intellectual property or is business sensitive, so I can't say which client satellites we'll be servicing.
I'm very hopeful that I'll get a strong technical paper through public release by the end of the year, ant at that point I could provide more detailed technical answers to things a HN audience would be interested in.
What software are you all using for kinematics and dynamics calculations?
It’s all custom flight code. The only software packages we use are basic matrix-vector libraries. Hopefully there will be a paper describing the dynamics/kinematics/controls algorithms soon.
sure seems like this could just as easily be used to perform on-orbit disassembly of a hostile nation's satellite?
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...
Absolutely, although it's a different ball of wax if you're trying to do RPO of this complexity with an adversarial body.
I would think there are much less expensive and more rapid methods of "on-orbit disassembly" than a system like this?
> on-orbit disassembly of a hostile nation's satellite?
Too complicated for disassembly. But totally valid for modification.
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.
It's almost impossibly hard to return things to earth from GEO. Robert Heinlein famously wrote that "a circular orbit is halfway to anywhere", which means that the most energetically difficult part of a mission to the Andromeda Galaxy is getting out of earth's gravity well.
To get back into earth's gravity well from a circular orbit requires similar amounts of fuel. Getting things back to earth from low earth orbit is doable, if you have a heat shield, because you only have to dump enough velocity to start hitting the atmosphere, and atmospheric drag does the rest of the work.
But that doesn't work at GEO, because you're so high (22,000 miles as opposed to ~1,000 miles for LEO). It's very hard to get enough delta-V (read as "change in velocity", which is basically the amount of fuel you need per unit mass) -- you'd need something with as much fuel as the upper stage of the rocket you were launched on, plus you'd need a heat shield. Alternatively you could use electric propulsion, which takes a lot less fuel, but would also take, literally, a couple of years, during which time you're a hazard to navigation to anything in a lower orbit. Plus, electric thrusters of the size you'd need to do this aren't cheap either.
So we basically never do that. If you need to dispose of a derelict satellite at that altitude, it turns out to be much easier to raise its orbit by a few thousand kilometers.
So, nobody will be recycling space debris that lives at GEO any time soon, unless someone figures out how to do it in situ.
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...
We use pretty standard BLDCs.
what's it like working with robot arms with that kind of latency? Any AI stuff (ML models etc) on board?
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.
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.
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.
The average person not interested in space won't know the difference between leo and geo in the first place.
Why would we? More importantly, why would anyone go to orbit period when you can do it with a robot.
You wouldn't. Ionizing radiation at GEO altitude quickly exceeds your lifetime exposure dose.
The Apollo (and Artemis II) astronauts went through GEO inside a metal capsule going as fast as they could.
a relatively detailed analysis of estimated radiation for a 650 day trip to mars:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9916691/
from other sources If I'm reading things right, one estimate of a round trip to mars would be 1000 millisieverts, which is considerable, the maximum allowed annual dose for a US radiation industry worker is 50mSv.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
TIL DARPA is still around. Kind of thought they got the “doge” treatment
But why isn’t it called WARPA now?
Since Pete took the helm and renamed things, it's definitely now the Whiskey Advanced Research Projects Agency.
DOGE got DOGE'd itself. It doesn't exist anymore.
Defense doesn’t get DOGE’d, only programs that build up communities do. There’s always budget for more destruction.
Wait until you find out which agency founded the Internet
The internet was conceived to be something very different from the web we all know and loathe. Anyway, I think GP was referring to building community centres, schools, libraries, and caring for vulnerable people. Those, it seems, were fully DOGE'd.
A real shame it's not a crewed spacecraft - would be nice to have crewed access to GEO...
Robots get the best jobs...
No mention of OSAM-1, $2 billion NASA mission cancelled due to delays, and likely due to this mission beating it to launch.
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/
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.)