| Subject: Canada may save the Hubble Space Telescope! |
Author:
Betty
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Date Posted: 11:07:23 06/27/04 Sun
In reply to:
Betty
's message, "Hubbble telescope to die & be destoyed" on 12:26:05 02/15/04 Sun
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center announced earlier this month that it intends to seek a bid for the robot from only one source, MD Robotics, which developed the Canadarm that helped correct a fault in Hubble's main lens in 1993. The robotic arms on all space shuttles, were devolped, designed, & built the the Canadian company.
The Brampton, Ontario company is now being asked to use the robotic arm and a double-armed robot it has developed for a possible repair mission.
"It's a really challenging mission because of the short timeline. There's really no time to do any research and development, per se," said Paul Cooper, vice president of business development for the company.
"So, it's a question of finding the technology that's tested and ready to roll and seems capable of doing the job."
NASA's decision, in the wake of the Columbia disaster, & president Bush's diversion of NASA funds to putting men on the moon & mars, to not use the shuttle and spacewalking astronauts to again service the orbiting telescope prompted public outcry. In March, NASA asked for ideas on how to repair Hubble robotically and received 26 ideas for saving the telescope operated by the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute.
The two devices developed by MD Robotics are the "only known system with the high level of maturity needed" to meet the integration, test, training, and launch requirements, NASA said in a procurement notice posted online. Bids are open, meanwhile, for the vehicle that will carry the robotic arms.
Without a repair mission to install new batteries and motion-control gyroscopes, the space telescope will eventually spin out of control and become useless, possibly as early as late 2007. Even if the mission is not conducted, NASA plans to send up a robotic mission to guide the telescope back to Earth to burn up & crash into the ocean when its orbit eventually deteriorates.
The repair mission, which has not been approved but is tentatively planned for late 2007, is similar to a program MD Robotics is working on with the Pentagon's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, also known as DARPA. DARPA's Orbital Express mission is hoping to show that a robotic vehicle can automatically rendezvous with and capture a satellite in space.
While that ability has yet to be proven, Orbital Express is in final development and will have been flown by late 2007, Cooper said.
The two-armed robot, the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator, is already built and waiting to be used to help build the international space station.
"Dexter is built and flight qualified. It's actually sitting in our clean room and waiting for launch," Cooper said. "It's not a question of whether it will work, it's a question of whether we can build a copy of it in time to be able to contribute to saving the Hubble."
Dexter has two seven-jointed arms, each ending in "hands" that can accept a variety of tools. The two-armed robot will be able to touch and feel much like a human, the company says.
The manipulator's primary role is expected to be delicate maintenance and servicing tasks on the International Space Station. Jobs it is expected to conduct on the space station include installing and removing small payloads such as batteries, power supplies and computers. On the space station, it will be controlled by the crew, which otherwise would have to conduct a spacewalk to perform the tasks.
On the Hubble, Dexter will have to perform tasks that seem ordinary on the ground -- pulling out a drawer that contains an instrument, removing and installing batteries and disconnecting and reconnecting their power cables.
Dexter, which can be controlled from the ground, can remember precisely where it was, allowing it to put the new drawer exactly in the spot from which the old one was removed. Dexter also has been designed with a sense of touch to avoid jamming that can damage Hubble.
"It's not so impossible as people first thought," Cooper said. "It's not so straightforward as having a human do it, but it's possible."
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