Henry,
That's definitely a possibility, but I think there are probably better
approaches. For our planned servicing/deorbit services, we've been working
on grappling fixtures that can enable a wide range of grappling methods to
safely interface with the target. That doesn't do anything about
preexisting spacecraft, but can make interfacing with future spacecraft
dramatically cheaper and easier. For grappling with pre-existing spacecraft
I'd still prefer mechanical grasping of known features (marman clamps,
solar array booms, etc) to the kind of underactuated truss grasping we did
for the ARM boulder grabber, but I guess that could be an option in some
corner cases.
~Jon
~Jon
On Sat, Dec 16, 2017 at 12:31 AM, Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Wed, 13 Dec 2017, Jonathan Goff wrote:
If the only problem you're trying to solve is deorbit, then yes there's a
broader class of solutions. But if you want to enable intact servicing as
well, you need something capable of grappling a target...
And if you want examples of how you might grapple to an uncooperative and
possibly tumbling target, just look at some of the design concepts for the
ARM mini-asteroid/boulder grabber that people came up with over the year or
two in which ARM was a going project. Not a trivial problem but not an
insuperable one either, especially if you accept that the grabber might be
a one-shot expendable device.
Henry
