When a satellite becomes unresponsive in orbit, there’s not much to be done — engineers can try in vain to hail the spacecraft and send it instructions, or perhaps blow it up in a show of bravado. But fixing it is pretty much out of the question, especially now that the space shuttle is retired.
But what if a remotely operated robot could do the job? Engineers at Johns Hopkins University have been working with a da Vinci surgical robot in a test of long-distance mechanical repair — call it satellite surgery.
On Nov. 29, graduate students Tian Xia and Jonathan Bohren used a modified da Vinci medical console to manipulate an industrial robot at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., about 30 miles away. The console was the same type used in cancer and cardiac surgery, and it was equipped with a 3-D eyepiece that let the students see and guide the robot remotely, as well as haptic feedback sensors. The robot was not a da Vinci, but an industrial machine. via PopSci
December 7, 2011
