Private Mission Launches To Extend Life of Out-of-Gas Communication Satellites (phys.org) 53
Northrop Grumman has launched a private satellite-servicing mission to attach life-extending "jetpacks" to aging communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit. "It's the second satellite-saving mission to launch this month, all part of a growing, money-saving effort to keep spacecraft running as long as possible," reports Phys.org. From the report: Launched by SpaceX, Northrop Grumman's mission robotic vehicle -- dubbed MRV -- and its jetpacks will spend the next year angling into the proper orbit 22,300 miles (36,000 kilometers) above Earth. Hundreds of satellites orbit at this so-called geosynchronous orbit, where they match the speed of Earth's rotation and keep to the same part of the sky for continuous coverage. Once in place by mid-2027, the minivan-sized spacecraft will use its 10-foot (9-meter) arms to attach a jetpack to an aging communication satellite. Then it will zip off to two more satellites in need.
For its debut flight, the spacecraft was accompanied by three electric-propelled jetpacks that peeled away separately following liftoff. Like the MRV, the jetpacks will use their own xenon gas thrusters to get to the desired orbit. Once in place, the jetpacks will wait for the robot to grab them, one at a time, and plug them into their designated satellites. Each jetpack -- the size of a washing machine -- will provide the necessary oomph for an out-of-gas satellite to keep operating for several more years instead of retiring. If it works, it will be a boon for satellite operators SES of Luxembourg and Optus of Australia, saving them millions of dollars in replacement costs.
For its debut flight, the spacecraft was accompanied by three electric-propelled jetpacks that peeled away separately following liftoff. Like the MRV, the jetpacks will use their own xenon gas thrusters to get to the desired orbit. Once in place, the jetpacks will wait for the robot to grab them, one at a time, and plug them into their designated satellites. Each jetpack -- the size of a washing machine -- will provide the necessary oomph for an out-of-gas satellite to keep operating for several more years instead of retiring. If it works, it will be a boon for satellite operators SES of Luxembourg and Optus of Australia, saving them millions of dollars in replacement costs.
Math (Score:2)
Before any "why wasn't this done before" conspiracy theories... It still takes the same fuel, energy, etc. The ideal rocket equation hasn't changed. Only the rocket has.
Re:Math (Score:5, Interesting)
The thrust to weight and specific impulse of ion thrusters, as well as the power to weight capability of the solar panels that'll be powering them, have actually been changing a lot, and that really shrunk the payload needed to make one of these "jetpacks" useful. The cost of the orbital launch per unit of mass changed less than what we can do with the mass once it's in orbit.
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I have no idea who rsilvergun is other than your obsessive posting about them. Are you some kind of a cheerleader with a weird humiliation fetish?
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Not really sure what you're trying to say about "conspiracy theories". I'm pretty sure there aren't too many people on this article with that kind of mindset. As far as whether it has been done before, the basic concept has, but this seems to be the first mission with independent booster systems that join up with a main robotic mechanic system. I am also not sure what you mean by "it takes the same fuel, energy, etc." The same as what? Basically this is using Xenon propellant in Hall effect thrusters that
Re: Math (Score:2)
Speaking of math. When did 10 feet become 9 meters?
Re: Math (Score:4, Funny)
They're accelerating VERY rapidly. In between the time that the Europeans read this and the time Americans see it, there's relativistic length contraction.
Re: Math (Score:1)
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That's odd: the article linked in the summary [phys.org] says, "Once in place by mid-2027, the minivan-sized spacecraft will use its 10-foot (3-meter) arms to attach a jetpack to an aging communication satellite. Then it will zip off to two more satellites in need."
Has it been corrected? It doesn't say. Or did copy and paste fail in some implausible fashion?
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Maybe corrected.
3-to-9 errors are common when using keypads: phone and computer keypads are inverted one to the other: 3 on one is 9 on the other, and vice versa. If you're not paying attention, it's really easy to do.
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The other thing is simple risk reward. Putting stuff in orbit is comparatively at least cheaper than it used to be.
It is also true that we have advanced quite a bit in hardened control systems. Let's not forget the almost magic/impossible degree of precision required to do this stuff. Did we have the technology 20 years ago; probably could been do sure.
Did anyone want to try a real mission when the likelihood of failure, development, and operational costs were much higher, no it made more sense to just
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Sure, it's one launch vs three, but moving between different orbits and physically latching on to another satellite is delicate work. I wouldn't be surprised if, on average, one of those three attempts went catastrophically wrong.
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That may be the case. That's why they were "wondering". The answer in fact could even be that time will tell if the risk pays off and that it's possible that, even if all three are successes, it still might actually not have been worth it vs. three new satellites on this attempt. Rather, if this succeeds as a proof of concept, it might actually shift from not technically being worth it this time to being worth it on future missions with even more moving parts. In other words, this could actually be an exper
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I was actually wondering exactly the opposite - If this only works for three satellites per launch, would it be overall cheaper and easier to just launch three new satellites?
IANARS[^1], but:
1. this sounds like a prototype
2. the 3 "jetpacks" that attach to the targets could be replenished separately
If this works, they could send up more jetpacks, the jetpacks would travel towards their targets, and then direct the robot minivan thing over to them to install them. Maybe this prototype robot will be deorbitted after these three but, if it works, the next one could be more permanent. Their whole idea is to keep satellites up in orbit, so I'd be shocked if they didn't plan to do the
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Re: Math (Score:1)
dual use (Score:2)
Such a system could also be used to attach to an enemy sat and deorbit it - an attack on a strategic target.
Re:dual use (Score:5, Informative)
That's like saying a Toyota Prius is dual use because you can drive one up to infantry standing against a wall and slowly crush them using it. Every military even remotely competitive at the orbital theater has incomparably cheaper and more reliable ways to disable satellites than to gently de-orbit them using a vehicle designed for sustained operation with very low acceleration requirements.
If there's any military utility, it'd be to attach devices that could intercept or tamper with communication going thorugh the satellite, but even that feels like hell of a stretch considering how expensive and difficult it would be and considering the moment the target notices you did that, you might have just as well just disabled the satellite at fraction of the effort, because at that point it's not like your enemy will keep using the bugged satellite.
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Well, not if it's a EU satellite. Russia intercept all their communications and the data EU satellites relay isn't even encrypted! EU continue using those satellite nevertheless...
That's misleading. The Defense Post [thedefensepost.com]: "European security officials warned in the Financial Times that two Russian space vehicles may have intercepted the unencrypted communications of at least a dozen key satellites over the continent."
First, note the phrase "may have". But more to the point, it isn't just the EU and Russia: "For years, parts of the satellite ecosystem have operated with weak or outdated security .... A team from the University of Maryland and UC San Diego spent three years studying satell
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That's like saying a Toyota Prius is dual use because you can drive one up to infantry standing against a wall and slowly crush them using it. Every military even remotely competitive at the orbital theater has incomparably cheaper and more reliable ways to disable satellites than to gently de-orbit them using a vehicle designed for sustained operation with very low acceleration requirements.
Do those other methods deorbit the target without creating more space junk? This has a lot more potential uses. It could effectively steal satellites. It could forcefully move GPS or starlink or whatever to new geosynchronous spots to both deprive the target country and improve coverage where desired.
Regardless, it's an interesting proof of concept to build a platform that could evolve to do more.
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Firstly, it's super unlikely that a military in the biz of open belligerent action in the orbit would be particularly concerned with kesslering the orbit because if we ever end up at the point of nations disabling each other's satellites, the aforementioned cheaper and more reliable ways of disabling satellites are extremely likely to end up happening in retaliation. Militaries are far less caring for the impact on "the environment" even in things that have far more practical human impact than oh well, no m
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As for stealing satellites and moving them to different orbits; any satellite designed for LEO would end up next to worthless in geosync and vice versa. ...
My mention of Starlink and GPS was unintentionally misleading. I didn't mean to imply moving to/from LEO to/from geosync; I mean moving within geosync to a new location. For example, moving from geosync over Russia to geosync over USA. Dunno why I had it in my head that GPS/GLONASS was geostationary, oops!
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Ummm. I mean, it could. What would the point be? I mean, there are much easier ways to make it inactive than de-orbiting it, including ones that also don't require blowing it up into shrapnel, etc. It doesn't really seem to introduce any new vulnerabilities. Unless you're suggesting dropping it on a target, in which case it's still far easier to just use the rocket you used to launch your interceptor as a missile to fire at the ground based target anyway.
10 feet do not 9 meters make (Score:1, Informative)
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Except this guy has REALLY big feet...
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Except this guy has REALLY big feet...
Or REALLY small metres...
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But ten yards does, so it's a 50/50 guess as to whether the error is in the original unit or the conversion. At least it's only half an order of magnitude out...
Re: 10 feet do not 9 meters make (Score:2)
If the person doing the unit translation isnâ(TM)t familiar with imperial units(most of the world except USA), they can be forgiven the error.
How many of us could do a good job figuring out how to make change for a purchase with pre decimal British currency. Pound, shilling, pence. How many farthings are in a Pound?
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Simple: there are four times as many farthings in a Pound as there are pence.
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And there are 240 pence in a pound, so that's 960 Farthings. Four farthings in a pence, 12 pence in a shilling, 20 shillings in a pound. Of course, then it gets more complicated when you get to coins like the guinea, which was introduced as a one pound gold coin, but since it was gold, was prone to fluctuating values, but the British government eventually locked its value at 21 shillings. Later, in the Regency era, they minted the sovereign, which had less gold to reset the value and that was worth exactly
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It's only rocket science. It's not like imperial to metric conversion errors are going to crash something into Mars or anything.
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Oh no, another metric / imperial mismatch like the $327 million Mars Climate Orbiter fiasco. This time they'll just poke out the eye of a geosynchronous satellite because they are 6.952 meters closer to it than they thought they were.
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Minivan-sized spacecraft (Score:2)
What happens to it after the mission? More space junk? TFA doesn't specify.
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pretty much all modern satellites carry de-orbiting or disposal-orbit capability. They either take themselves down into the atmosphere (aiming for "point nemo", google it) or go to one of the stable lagrange points to die.
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one thing I missed, since they're "merving" the jet packs, I'd bet the idea is for the main service robot to remain in orbit after running around and attaching the packs, and then sit there waiting for more packs to be launched, and attach those to additional satellites. Makes sense, saves costs not having to launch another heavy and expensive servicing robot for each refueling, you just need to launch semi-autonomous fueled jet packs and let the "mechanic" waiting in orbit attach them.
Mission Extension Vehicle (Score:5, Informative)
Also worth noting that this follows on from the earlier Northrup-Grumman "Mission Extension Vehicle", which in 2019 launched to dock and reposition Intelsat 901, a first for a telerobotically operated spacecraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Some sites:
https://www.northropgrumman.co... [northropgrumman.com]
https://news.northropgrumman.c... [northropgrumman.com]
Coincidentally, Northrup Grumman was also involved in the SWIFT reboost mission, launched the beginning of this month, tp extend the lifetime of the Swift orbital telescope by boosting it into a higher orbit. (In this case, though, they didn't build the spacecraft, just provided the launch service, on a Pegasus)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/n... [cbsnews.com]
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Why? (Score:1)
Perhaps for geosynchronous orbits. But we actually want LEO satellites to re-enter the atmosphere. The resulting aluminum oxides left there will increase the earth's albedo and help mitigate global warming.
Just think: Elon saves the planet!
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But we don't want that! Yes, we want the global temperatures to stay down, but not by having less sunlight. That would have its own set of problematic consequences.
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That would have its own set of problematic consequences.
Such as?
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Seriously? Basically all life on Earth as we know it (with the exception of stuff like chemosynthetic life) ultimately gets its energy from the sun. When I was a kid, they taught this stuff in kindergarten. All other things being equal (and subject to some other factors, but not ones that greatly invalidate this general rule) crop yields are directly proportional to the amount of light we get from the sun. Dim that enough to prevent global warming, and we can't feed ourselves any more without using a lot mo
Hundreds? (Score:2)
Which is why I have always wanted, and thuoght it was stupid *not* to have a few - three? six? *large* satellites at geosync, and simply attach more functions at the end of booms. Then you only have the big ones to worry about stationkeeping with.
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Maybe, maybe not. The Kyiv Post [kyivpost.com], "Ukraine's Global Voice", presumably not a Russian propaganda outlet [wikipedia.org], says, "Russia's Su-57 Fifth-Generation Fighter Jet Crashes Near Moscow. In brief: A Russian Su-57 fifth-generation fighter jet crashed during a training flight near Moscow. The pilot ejected, no casualties were reported, and the Russian authorities have not disclosed the cause of the incident."
The story is in English but with photo captions in Russian for some odd reason. (It's possible my browser is tra
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Dear fucking moron, what does this have to do with either what I posted, or the story this is about?
Are you being *paid* to post propaganda?
How plug them in? (Score:2)
Or is there some widely adopted interface for this on many satellites?
Or did engineers just figure out that there's a "red wire and a black wire" (two power conduit phases) somehow exposed at the surface of these particular satellites, which the robots know how to splice into?
Enquiring minds want to know.
Out of Gas (Score:2)
Extend Life of Out-of-Gas Communication Satellites
Does it involve replacing the engine compression coil [wikipedia.org]? :-)