First Robotic Satellite Servicer Launched

walrus01•about 1 hour 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.

redbridgerock•about 1 hour 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•about 2 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•about 2 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.

cameron_b•about 2 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•about 2 hours ago

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

pennomi•about 2 hours ago

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

ButlerianJihad•about 1 hour ago

Wait until you find out which agency founded the Internet

wrs•about 1 hour ago

But why isn’t it called WARPA now?

petcat•about 2 hours ago

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

sivex•29 minutes 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•6 minutes 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/

First Robotic Satellite Servicer Launched

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (12 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews