One day, robots will ascend into the heavens, take working parts off of dead satellites, and use them to construct new ones. That’s the dream of the Pentagon’s blue-sky researchers, and they’ve already gotten started in the laboratory.
The video above, released by Darpa on Tuesday, displays the initial stages of Darpa’s Phoenix project, an effort that began last year to make satellites cheaper. And the way Darpa wants to control those costs is to have space robots pluck functional antennas off of dead satellites floating above geosynchronous orbit, and combine them with small, modular “satlets” into new, longer lasting communications satellites. Darpa combined the footage of the lab research on the Phoenix component robots with a computer-generated rendering of how the project might work in space four years from now when Darpa tests it.
“The fundamental precept is cost,” says David Barnhart, Darpa’s program manager for Phoenix. “That is the bottom line: is there a way that we can completely rethink the cost-calculus of how satellites are put together?” Satellite launches are really expensive: think tens of millions of dollars for the satellite and then tens of millions of more to get it into space. And most of what’s floating in space is debris, junk and dead sats: out of 1300 “space objects,” Barnhart says, only 500 are functioning satellites. If Darpa can resurrect just a fraction of that floating junk, it points to a cost-effective way to maintain the U.S.’ edge in space.
So the ghoulish, $180 million effort depends on things like the FREND, a robotic arm designed by the Naval Research Laboratories‘ space-engineering division. The arm will be one of Phoenix’s main limbs, used to sever an antenna from a dead satellite and attach it to the network of satlets Darpa’s building. Another crucial part of Phoenix, unveiled to the public in this video, will bond materials together in space without using any mechanical parts: one model Darpa’s working with will adhere them using an electrostatic charge, and another “is patterned after how a Gecko crawls up walls,” Barnart says, “using thousands of individual micro hair-like follicles on its foot pads.” A touchscreen, shown here in a laboratory, will theoretically allow a remote human operator to control a robot as it cuts through a piece of space debris.
That is, if the tech isn’t so ridiculously complicated that it cancels out the reduced launch costs. There are a lot of variables: keeping costs down while launching the satlets into orbit; controlling fuel use; and not destroying space antennas that weren’t designed so that robots could deconstruct them. “If you cannot replace the appropriate function, which we translate into mass, of that very large satellite… to control that [antenna], then it doesn’t make sense,” Barnhart concedes. Darpa will host a “proposer’s day” for makers who might want to build the satlets, robots and associated Phoenix systems on Feb. 8 in northern Virginia.
Lab work, extending to 2015, will test the concept. Next month, Darpa will announce the next wave of its Phoenix research, which will explore such concepts as “safe and responsible space-to-space interaction.” Just because Darpa wants its celestial handymen to combine old antennas with new mini-satellites doesn’t mean it’s cutting back on robotic workplace safety.
Video: Darpa's Robots Practice Scavenging Space Junk From Satellites
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Video: Darpa's Robots Practice Scavenging Space Junk From Satellites
