I was browsing and found this really interesting link. It’s NASA’s Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology (DART) Vehicle News. From the article:
The Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology, or DART, is a flight demonstrator vehicle designed to test technologies required to locate and rendezvous with other spacecraft. The DART mission is unique in that all of the operations will be autonomous – there will be no astronaut onboard at the controls, only computers programmed to perform functions. Developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., the DART vehicle will be launched on a Pegasus rocket to test rendezvous, close proximity operations and its control between the vehicle and a stationary satellite in orbit. The DART mission provides a key step in establishing autonomous rendezvous capability for the United States.
The implications of this are that you probably would not need to send astronauts up into space to do minor repairs or to do routine maintainance. I guess this was an step decided aftet the Columbia aircraft blew apart. Kalpana Chawla, an Alumni of my University and my Department was also part of that tragic accident.
On a different note, this would be huge technological challenge. The amount of controls needed are mind-boggling, and there are systems of sub-systems which need to be coordinated and synchronised to act in the exact way desired in an unknown environment. The satellites move at very high velocities, and even adverse vibrations could make or break the mission. My guess is that there is a higher level of logic, AI even, controlling the lower layer of control system(s) which are less flexible in nature, and react to inputs through the higher logic level.And of course, a lot of sensors!
Links to documents on the above link are pretty descriptive, and help get a general idea of the situation in hand. There is also an animation which shows what is going to happen and how. Have fun!
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