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Welcome to In-Orbit, the fortnightly podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world.
[00:00:04] Dallas Campbell: Hello and welcome to Outer Orbit, one of our little bonus episodes where we continue the conversation from one of our main episodes. Today we're joined by Jeremy Hadall who's the Robotics Development Lead at the Satellite Applications Catapult, and you may remember, he was on last series, we actually visited what do we even call it? The robot yard. What,
[00:00:24] Jeremy Hadall: We, we call it the ISAM Facility, so it's the in orbit Servicing and Assembly and Manufacturing facility, and yeah, we call it the yard. It's not really a yard, it's just a big black, dark long room as you remember.
[00:00:35] Dallas Campbell: It needs some like kind of cool sci-fi name.
[00:00:37] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah.
Well, we've named all the robots, so we've got, well, we've got Mani and Sol are our main robots, and then we have Kvasir which is the Norse God of imagination and invention and we've got Baldur the guardian of the gates of hell, which, nice, nice. You know, this is what happens when you employ, graduate engineers.
[00:00:55] Dallas Campbell: You can't see this cause we're not filming it. But on the wall behind me, we've got a picture of it and they do, it does look very sci-fi because your room is black because it were meant to be in space, and just to remind our listeners what is it that your robots do?
[00:01:08] Jeremy Hadall: So, our robots are black and they're there to mimic the in orbit environment. So what...
[00:01:13] Dallas Campbell: So the way they move would be the way that a satellite might move.
[00:01:15] Jeremy Hadall: Exactly that.
What we're trying to do is to imitate the way a satellite would move in orbit by using the robots.
We need to use the robots to do that because obviously in orbit we don't have gravity, we don't have air resistance, we don't have a lot of the things that we take for granted on earth. But the robots can adjust the way they move to become that kind of environment for us.
The robots are important, but actually they're not the most important thing in that room. What's most important is the things that are on the end of the robot. So the satellite models, the equipment that we carry, they're the most important things for testing in that room and then the robots are become important because we have to then take off the shelf industrial robots and make them act as if they're satellites.
[00:01:58] Dallas Campbell: So just to, just to be clear. So you would have ain your big long black room, you've got a satellite which would behave as if it was in orbit and then you have an approaching robot with a hand on it or whatever it is on it that can do the fiddling about, and between them, they behave as they would.
[00:02:16] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah, that's exactly, that's exactly what we do. Yeah, so it, so that could either be from what we call rendezvous proximity operations, which basically means coming up close to another satellite or actually doing something to the, what we call the target satellite or the, the satellite we want to go and see.
[00:02:29] Dallas Campbell: And the point of all this is?
[00:02:30] Jeremy Hadall: So the point of all of this is firstly we need to get close to the satellite, so we need to be able to identify it, navigate towards it in space, and we can test all of that in the facility. We need to dock to the satellite. Which is not necessarily easy because this isn't the ISS. They're not designed for docking. And then once we've docked, we want to possibly refuel the satellite, service it, so change parts on the satellite. Maybe it's got a damaged solar panel. And also we might be able to assemble much bigger structures.
[00:02:59] Dallas Campbell: When we had the space shuttle for example, we could do things like go and fix the Hubble Space Telescope because it's got a wonky mirror or whatever it might be. We can't really do this at the moment, can't really go to satellites and tinker about fiddle, about refuel them. So this is a way of servicing things in orbit.
[00:03:15] Jeremy Hadall: Absolutely. You're right, one of the Shuttles primary roles was to build the ISS, take the bits up and assemble them, and also to carry out the Hubble Service missions. Currently there is no easy or simple way to do any of that now, because we don't have the Shuttle and nothing is really designed to do that.
So not only are we testing out the new technologies that will allow us to do that, but we're also starting to look at how do we design those satellites? What things do we need to change or things do we need to add to make it happen?
[00:03:41] Dallas Campbell: Actually, and the point is as well, that when we, when it was the Shuttle building the trusses of the space station or Hubble, astronauts were involved. You'd tie an astronaut to a bit of space arm and off they'd go. But this is all robotics.
[00:03:53] Jeremy Hadall: This is all robotics. So this is, this is moving away from the Shuttle approach, which was, yes, you had a robot arm, but it was generally manipulated from within the Shuttle itself. And astronauts actually did the work themselves. We're trying to go to the stage where we might have astronauts in the interim term controlling the robots. But ultimately we want to do this fully autonomous. So one of the things we're looking at is how do we build that autonomous ability, that capability into the robots?
[00:04:20] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. So you've had an overhaul. So tell us what's improved. What's changed?
[00:04:24] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah, so I think when you were there, we were just starting the overhaul. I think we were just about to stop working the yard and, and to reconfigure it. So we were very fortunate, UK Space Agency gave us a 2 million pound stock grade of facility.
[00:04:36] Dallas Campbell: They're very generous.
[00:04:38] Jeremy Hadall: So we've done a number of, a number of things in the facility. We've repainted it. That's not the biggest, biggest thing, but we needed to repaint it.
[00:04:45] Dallas Campbell: They gave you 2 million pounds.
[00:04:46] Jeremy Hadall: No, no, I shouldn't say
[00:04:47] Dallas Campbell: Presumably it's black.
[00:04:48] Jeremy Hadall: So we needed, we needed to repaint it because after all the work we've done, so if you remember, we had a lot of motion tracking systems in there.
So we've upgraded all of those. So motion capture was good for us. It told us where the robots were, but what it couldn't really do is it was make sure the robots went to the right places. So now we have that capability so that allows us to give a lot of verifiable data to our users. We've got a new lighting system, which is on a robot called Braggy.
Kind of light you would see at Glastonbury. It's a very big rotating pan tilt spotlight and it's on a mobile robot. So we can move it to wherever we want to in the facility and it mimics the motion of the sun around satellites in the orbit. So...
[00:05:28] Dallas Campbell: And why is that important?
[00:05:29] Jeremy Hadall: Well, it's important because, if you're in low Earth orbit, so let's say the same sort of orbit as the International Space Station, you've got a 90 minute day, basically. The sun goes up and down in 90 minutes and if you don't test your systems with that kind of lighting conditions of going very bright to very dark.
These kind of operations happen very slowly. You would miss that crucial bit of what happens when the sun comes up. Which sounds crazy, but it has a big effect on some of the sensor systems. So we've got that system in there. We've got a big, virtual environment now that we've built around the system so we can do a lot of simulation and testing and then the biggest piece of equipment we've put in is something we call the Gravity Offload System.
That's really important for us. As I said earlier, on earth, we can't replicate the in orbit environment perfectly. Because we have gravity and air.
But in orbit we don't have any of that stuff and that changes the way that satellites react if you touch them. So the best way I can explain this is if you imagine you're standing on the, on the ground and you throw a tennis ball in the air.
Eventually air resistance will slow that tennis ball down, and then gravity will take over and the tennis ball will come back down to it to Earth, and maybe you'll catch it or maybe you'll drop it. If you are standing on the ISS and do exactly the same and throw that tennis ball up. There's no air resistance, there's no gravity, so that tennis ball will keep traveling away from you until another force acts upon it.
So if you come up to a satellite and try and dock and you don't make a good positive connection straight away, you are putting a force into that satellite. So that satellite is now moving away from you at a speed, and it will keep going forever until something else happens. So what the Gravity Offload System does is mimic that effect. We suspend a device from the system. It looks a little bit like a crane, but it's a much more sophisticated version of a crane. So we suspend a satellite model from it. It holds itself in position. We have an internal measurement unit, an IMU, that measures the forces being put through the device, and it's very, very sensitive to the extent that we've had to move some of the air conditioning around so that we don't get wind pushing it against it and if it detects a force, then the offload system moves the satellite away from the impact point as if it was in space. That sounds simple ish.
[00:07:40] Dallas Campbell: It's probably quite complicated
[00:07:42] Jeremy Hadall: It is very complicated to do on earth. We've been fortunate to work with a company called Amentum. Amentum have put a lot of effort into working with it, so we're really pleased to have worked with them.
[00:07:52] Dallas Campbell: So you've got this great setup now, are you inviting people now to come in?
It's like we're, we're open for business if you, so how do people get in touch?
[00:08:00] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah. So we're definitely open for business. If people are interested in understanding what the capabilities are then they can get in contact with the Catapult through the website.
[00:08:08] Dallas Campbell: And is this an area that Britain is poised and key to really use and develop and exploit.
[00:08:16] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah, I think we're definitely poised to develop and exploit it. We're in Harwell today and just in the Harwell campus, there must be a dozen companies who are developing these kind of technologies who are ready to go. You can look, think to people like GMV or Astro Scale who are here on the Harwell campus.
They're developing these technologies. They've used the system. They're planning to use the system in the future. So we are, we are right at the leading edge of this kind of technology and where we can take it.
[00:08:40] Dallas Campbell: That's great. Well listen, thank you very much. Good luck with it. I'm going to come back next year and even more amazing things I'm sure.
[00:08:47] Jeremy Hadall: Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:08:48] Dallas Campbell: But I wish you all the best for this year.
[00:08:49] Jeremy Hadall: Thank you very much. Thank you.
[00:08:51] Dallas Campbell: To hear future episodes of In Orbit, be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app and head over to YouTube to watch the video versions of all of our discussions. And if you'd like to find out more about how Space is empowering your industry, visit the Catapult website or join them on social media.