By Clay Dillow Posted 06.27.2012 at 4:45 pm 5 Comments

DARPA's Phoenix Tender, Removing a Working Antenna from a Dead Satellite DARPA

In late 2011, DARPA announced its intention to create an on-orbit capability to harvest dead satellites and recycle their parts into new orbiting communications outposts. In 2012, the research arm of the DoD is making good. Danger Room reports the agency has awarded its first contract ($2.5 million to a Northrop Grumman division for technology development), organized a summit on sustainable satellite servicing, and began seeking its first candidate satellite on which it hopes to demonstrate these technologies by 2015.

The program--called Phoenix--hopes to make use of all of the dead satellite hardware parked in geosynchronous “graveyard” orbits around Earth. While these satellites are largely out of propellant and loaded with old or obsolete technologies, some components--antennas are supposedly the primary target here--are still perfectly usable. DARPA envisions launching a largely autonomous servicing satellite armed with all kinds of robotic tools that is capable of rendezvousing with these dead satellites in space and stripping them of their useful parts.

Related Articles

Orbiting Robot Will Gather Space Junk and Turn It Into New Satellites
As Space Collision Threat Looms, Pentagon Upgrades Its Monitoring of Satellites
Autonomous Satellite Chasers Can Use Robotic Vision to Capture Orbiting Satellites

Tags

Technology, Clay Dillow, darpa, military, phoenix, satellites, Space, space warfare, Video
But that’s only half the challenge. Assuming DARPA is able to build and launch such a robotic space salvager, it still needs a way to repurpose components on orbit. For that, the agency would also launch a bunch of “satlets”--small satellites stripped of all but the most necessary hardware--that would meet up with the larger service-sat in space. These satlets could then be fitted with antennas and other hardware and parked in their own orbits, after which they could be used by the Pentagon for bouncing communications across the globe or feeding data like drone footage to troops on the ground.

Such a system could drastically reduce the costs of the Pentagon’s space program, which spends millions keeping its space-based communications battle-ready. But nothing like this has ever been tried before. The servicing satellite alone would require a significant amount of robotic autonomy--it would need to know how best to dock with and dismantle a vast array of different satellite types--as well as a range of reusable robotic tools.

But as we noted when we first wrote about Phoenix in October of last year, if DARPA does pull this off it will end up with a suite of bleeding edge space and robotics technologies that could prove useful for a range of applications, both benign and decidedly military. So the DoD gets cheap communications satellites, but it also expands its on orbit capabilities. More over at Danger Room.

[Danger Room]

5 Comments

Link to this comment
The Techlusion
07/01/12 at 1:48 pm

|Such a system could drastically reduce the costs of the Pentagon’s space program, which spends millions keeping its space-based communications battle-ready"
Explain a bit please

Link to this comment
omegamolina
07/16/12 at 2:23 pm

hey darpa how about do a collection mission , where you go around collect all the useless old space orbit gadegetry and out dated satllites put them together so its one object. leave it still in the geosyncrhronous graveyard then return back to earth . figure out how to remove that, in one collected structure out in space, here on earth 1n five months in the phase 2 of called cllection mission. yeaah baby sunny boy dont just think about it meditate on it. if you (nasa) put them up there you can bring them back down here, come on nasa show me what your worth. live up to youre rep.and represent.

Link to this comment
dv8inpp
07/22/12 at 4:58 am

My first thoughts are, why haven't they followed the PC business and designed systems in which you can interchange parts. You buy your power modules from company X, these modules have inputs and outputs that are well documented so that when you want to plug into your I/O bus the connectors are in the right place. Probably not as cost efficient as designing the smallest, cheapest, lightest item when you're paying by the pound to get it up there, but in the long run probably better to be able to just swap out a faulty module than a whole satellite.

Second thoughts were about the raw materials flying around in space. It cost a lot to put it there so I hope they are putting more effort into re-cycling and processing raw materials in space, starting with the scrap would be a good way to begin before trying to strip mine an asteroid or even the moon.

So start building modular satellites and re-cycling the old ones for their scrap value.

Link to this comment
space geek
09/26/12 at 8:57 pm

Your right about the module thing. But swaping old satellites with new ones is smart but why don't they send a special big sized satellite/space station to a specific orbit. With a couple of collecting probes to collect old satellites and use their parts and scrap metal to make new ones in the space station/satellite. Then the collecting probes could fly back to the satellites orbit and release it back into orbit.

Link to this comment
Nix
11/05/12 at 1:05 am

Finally someones cleaning up our litter.



June 2013: American Energy Independence

Five amazing, clean technologies that will set us free, in this month's energy-focused issue. Also: how to build a better bomb detector, the robotic toys that are raising your children, a human catapult, the world's smallest arcade, and much more.


Online Content Director: Suzanne LaBarre | Email
Senior Editor: Paul Adams | Email
Associate Editor: Dan Nosowitz | Email
Assistant Editor: Colin Lecher | Email
Assistant Editor: Rose Pastore | Email

Contributing Writers:

Kelsey D. Atherton | Email
Francie Diep | Email
Shaunacy Ferro | Email

circ-top-header.gif
circ-cover.gif