NASA's Shuttle Experiment To Test In-Flight Repair & Refueling
We often advised and practically carry out the servicing of our vehicles day in and day out, yeah nothing new to that, but scientists are now on their way to provide the same maintenance facilities to the satellites as well.
It may not seem truly at the first glance but this is what an experiment shuttle Atlantis delivered to the International Space Station could lead to! It aims at providing the predicament roadside services to the satellites in case of any breakdowns or failures. There are as many as 450 government and commercial satellites equipping us with rise above, communication and other facilities operating at miles of distances above the globe. If all of them run out of fuel someday and be thrown away, then what? To some a possible situation! One possible solution suggested by Ben Reed, deputy project manager of the Sycophant Servicing Capabilities Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland- “If a automaton could go up and refuel it, you wouldn’t have to throw it away.” So this job has been assigned to ROSIE: Technically called the Robotic Refueling Job or the RRM, Rosie is a 550 pound washing machine size box equipped with a set of tools that performs the respective tool enterprise on the satellite. Rosie would not actually refuel or repair anything but with the help of a Canadian built robot- Dextre it would manifest that such fuelling and repairing of satellites is possible in space, something never envisioned before! NASA envisions a not-too-distant approaching in which a fleet of commercially operated tow trucks zip from one hobbled spacecraft to another to add fuel, help deploy a stuck solar array or antenna, or shove the sputnik into a safe “graveyard” orbit, potentially saving billions of dollars. These tow trucks would in froing be filled by some other orbiting tanker.
