First Robotic Satellite Servicer Launched

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.

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.

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.

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