A robot has just built part of a structure in space. And it did it without any astronauts involved. 🤖🚀
It’s part of a project called ASTRA, developed by researchers at Caltech with funding from DARPA.
The idea is pretty simple, but the possibilities are huge. Instead of building something on Earth, folding it up and finding a way to squeeze it inside a rocket, why not send the materials up separately and assemble it once it’s in orbit?
That’s exactly what this robot is designed to do.
During its demonstration, it successfully assembled part of a 1.4 metre antenna reflector in space.
It might not look like much, but getting robots to reliably connect structures together in orbit is a big engineering challenge.
And if we can get this working on a much larger scale, it could open up some interesting possibilities. Think much bigger space telescopes, enormous antennas and solar arrays that would simply be too large to launch in one piece.
There’s still plenty to figure out, but I love the idea that future spacecraft and space stations could actually be built in space, rather than having to be launched fully assembled from Earth.
Quite a different way of thinking about how we’ll build things beyond our planet.
First photo is from the actual experiment.
Home Kong will always have our hearts, so we had to write it a song.
There are simply too many fabulous things about this place for one track… so another one is already in the pipeline. Brace yourself. 😂
Meanwhile, the full version is streaming on all the usual platforms.