A test environment to demonstrate the feasibility of telepresent on-orbit servicing

Spacecrafts are the only complex engineering systems without hands-on maintenance and repair-supporting infrastructure. Though occasionally there have been Space-Shuttle-based servicing missions, such as the Solar Maximum Repair Mission (SMRM) in 1984, usually on-orbit maintenance procedures are not foreseen for an individual spacecraft. However, the explorative and manipulative possibilities of robots could be used to dock a servicer spacecraft onto a malfunctioning target spacecraft and execute On-Orbit Servicing (OOS) operations, controlled by an operator from ground. To date the servicing spacecrafts of most of the robotic OOS demonstration missions are equipped with a high degree f autonomy. A different approach is to utilize the concept of telepresence for OOS. It involves the permanent control of the servicer satellite and its robotic components from ground. This paper describes a test environment for telepresent OOS, which included the ground station of the Institute of Astronautics (LRT) at Technische Universität München, Germany and the ESA ground station in Redu, Belgium. Both were connected via the geostationary ESA relay satellite ARTEMIS. The goal of this setup was to demonstrate telepresent OOS via GEO elay satellites. For that purpose test series have been undertaken, in which a teleoperation with visual and haptic feedback was performed in near real time via the ARTEMIS link.