Since the last Space Shuttle catastrophe, NASA has scaled back on all subsequent Space Shuttle missions, except for the ones necessary to complete the United States obligations to the International Space Station. Our Space Shuttle is being phased out.
Unfortunately, this is bad news for the Hubble Space Telescope which relies on periodic maintenance missions from astronauts.
Without the Space Shuttle maintenance missions scheduled for 2006, Hubble could very soon after be out of commission, or even fall from orbit, buring up in Earth’s atmosphere as early as 2007.
However, it seems there may be some hope, thanks to the Canadian company MD Robotics who have developed a robot, the “Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator” which is proving to be quite capable of handling all the necessary maintenance tasks to keep Hubble performing its wonderous work for at least another five years.
For any robotics system, particularly a robotics system that is operating in space, the tasks required to complete maintenance to the HST will be challenging. The variety of tasks and the dexterity required present formidable challenges. However, the creators of the SPDM system are no strangers to these unique challenges.
MD Robotics created the Canadarm, the large robotic arm present in the Space Shuttles that assist astronauts with satellite deployment and retrieval. It’s also been used for a variety of tasks it was never desgined for, proving its flexibility and ingenuity of its design.
They also created the Canadarm2, which lives on the ISS, inching its way around the exterior of the space station, performing its required tasks.
NASA has yet to officially announce anything about the possible use of the SPDM system – the price is not cheap, likely around $1 billion USD.
However, not only could we save the Hubble Space Telescope, which has accomplished so much in expanding our understanding of the universe in which we have emerged, but we could also use this mission to prove a new technological system that falls in line perfectly with our newly-defined focus toward planetary exploration that involves, heavily, the use of robotic “partners”.
Although a new space telescope is planned for deployment in 2011, this telescope is not a telescope that “sees” in the visible light spectrum, but instead, infrared. Although exploring within the infrared spectrum has many benefits over using visible light, the “human” factor – the appreciation of the incredible beauty of stellar and interstellar objects may be lessened.
The new telescope is called the James Webb Space Telescope. This telescope will not orbit Earth, but will instead be place about 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth, away from the Sun. In fact, it will be seated in orbit around Lagrange Point 2, which is a gravitational balancing point between the Earth and Sun.
