Truly astronomical sums of money go into building the space infrastructure that we depend on for many of the daily luxuries that we take for granted, like weather forecasts and GPS. Even without the cost of a launch vehicle, a typical communication satellite costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 to $250 million, putting the total cost of all the space assets constantly zipping around our planet well into the hundreds of billions. And until recently, if something went wrong with one of these satellites or if a perfectly useful satellite simply ran out of fuel, even the most brilliant engineers had no way to save it.
"All of my potential clients are traveling at many, many, many thousands of miles an hour in the deep blackness of space," Benjamin Reed, deputy project manager of the Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Tech Times. "Without eyes on the spot, all of the other tools in my tool caddy are somewhat useless."
Reed and others involved in NASA's Robotic Refueling Mission (RRM), an experimental module aboard the International Space Station, are working to change that. In 2012, NASA reached out to a medical technology company in Israel called Medigus because its micro ScoutCam, just 1.2 millimeters in diameter, was the smallest camera that the researchers could find in their international search. This teeny camera was developed for boring into bodies so that surgeons can see while performing minimally invasive surgery, but NASA needed a camera that could get deep within the nooks and crannies of satellites in space.
At the time, Medigus didn't have FDA approval for the device, so on the website it was clearly labeled "not for use in the United States" when they got an email from someone asking, "If it is not for medical use, can I use it in the United States?"
"I looked at the email address of the sender and saw it was from nasa.gov," Yaron Silberman, vice president of sales and marketing at Medigus, told Tech Times. "That's when I realized that we had something interesting."
Medigus had developed this camera for a specific surgery to correct a common disease called gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) that afflicts over 20 million Americans. It developed the camera as part of an endoscope, a snake-like medical device that surgeons can send into the body through a small opening so that large incisions aren't necessary. What was needed was a camera that would take up only a small fraction of the real estate at the tip of the scope so that surgical tools could fit alongside it.
Endoscopes used to probe satellites instead of bodies are called borescopes. Thanks to this remarkable medical device, NASA's Visual Inspection Poseable Invertebrate Robot (VIPIR) is now equipped with the most versatile borescope ever made. The camera is fitted onto the end of a 34-inch deployable video borescope, and the tip can articulate up to 90 degrees in four opposing directions. Perhaps someday when something goes wrong with a satellite in orbit, that company can call up NASA and request that it fly VIPIR out to take a look.
This is critical, because satellites are not alone up there, of course. Meteoroids and bits of space junk are shooting through space, too, and it's not like you can just tell them to stay in their lane. There is always a chance that one will hit a satellite in a sensitive spot and impair its functioning. So when a problem arises, it's impossible to tell if that problem is the result of a design flaw or a random piece of space stuff that no one could have done much to prevent.
"The company is faced with a quandary: Do they change their design for all future satellites at a high cost? Or do they simply keep building them exactly the same, owing that on-orbit failure to something that won't ever happen again?" Reed says. "That can be a very costly decision if made poorly"
VIPIR has three cameras on board to scope out the situation. In addition to the teeny camera from Medigus (center in the photo below), it features a motorized zoom lens (left) and another camera to take in the bigger picture. The extremely tiny size of the borescope allows it to thoroughly inspect components deep within the satellite.
There are "five Rs" of satellite servicing that NASA and its many collaborators are working on right now, according to Reed: remote inspection, relocation, refueling, repair, and replacement. In May, experiments conducted in the RRM module on the ISS proved that the new borescope is up to the task of remote inspection when controllers on Earth used it to navigate a "mechanically torturous" obstacle course in space.
"It performed like a champ," Reed says, before correcting himself. "I'm sorry, in NASA terms it performed nominally, as we expected it to."
The fact that even in the best-case scenario, satellites that cost hundreds of millions of dollars will fall prey to a decaying orbit as they run out of fuel shows just how much progress is left to be made. As the name suggests, refueling is another of the "Rs" that NASA is tackling aboard the RRM module.
"The commercial satellite servicing industry is a nascent industry," says Reed. "Right now, to my knowledge, and I've been studying this for the last 16 years, the only satellite that has ever been refueled is the International Space Station."
The GPS fleet, weather satellites, communication satellites, imagery satellites, the ISS itself, the Hubble Space Telescope – they're all in that same general classification of very useful, very valuable on-orbit assets that could one day need a service call from VIPIR.
VIPIR has been run through its paces, according to Reed, and NASA presently has no future plans to evaluate it further. But he did mention that he and his colleagues are already working on "the offspring of VIPIR," a new and improved version of the robot that will have even better cameras and greater capabilities. That's expected to launch in the next two years or so.
