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An outline of OSAM-1 (backside) servicing a satellite tv for pc. | Supply: NASA
NASA’s On-orbit Servicing, Meeting, and Manufacturing 1 (OSAM-1) mission accomplished its crucial design evaluate final week, bringing it a step nearer to launch in 2025 on the earliest.
The OSAM-1 mission goals to be the primary ever to refuel a satellite tv for pc not designed to be serviced. OSAM-1 will even enable NASA to reveal its in-space manufacturing capabilities by producing a spacecraft beam by way of a course of known as pultrusion.
In the course of the mission, OSAM-1 will journey to Landsat 7, an Earth-observing satellite tv for pc launched in 1999, and refuel it. The mission will contain a spacecraft bus, which handed its crucial evaluate virtually a 12 months in the past, a servicing payload with 16 subsystems, together with instruments, imaginative and prescient programs and two robotic arms, a floor system and the Tempo Infrastructure Dexterous Robotic (SPIDER) payload.
The SPIDER payload may have a 3rd robotic arm, which it’ll use to fabricate a beam and assemble a useful communications antenna with stowed elements.
The evaluate, which included every a part of the system, verified that OSAM-1’s design was full and that it met specified necessities. This milestone permits NASA to start building of the spacecraft, payloads and floor system.
Maxar Applied sciences will deliver the spacecraft bus to NASA’s Goddard House Flight Middle in Greenbelt, Maryland later this 12 months. There, engineers will end integration and testing of all of OSAM-1’s elements.
NASA awarded Maxar Applied sciences with a $142 million contract at the start of 2020 to design SPIDER and the spacecraft bus. SPIDER will journey on a modified Restore-L spacecraft bus.
Efficiently refuelling a satellite tv for pc not meant to be serviced will enable satellite tv for pc operators to have new methods to handle their fleets extra effectively. If the mission goes nicely, NASA hopes to include servicing applied sciences into different missions.
NASA’s satellite tv for pc servicing applied sciences have additionally been licensed by Northrop Grumman. NASA hopes to jumpstart a home servicing business by making its applied sciences commercially obtainable.
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