Tom Spears,
Ottawa Citizen;
August 26, 2009
An Ottawa company's "eyes" for space are set to launch to test ways of steering unmanned spaceships to Mars and the moon.
It's hard enough to land a robotic spaceship on Mars, with a landing zone several kilometres wide. Tougher still is the problem of having one spaceship dock precisely with another, all robotically.
Yet that's what the future will look like if robotic supply ships are ever to travel to human bases on another planet.
The laser-based eyes for such a ship — and for other space ventures — are built by Neptec Design Group of Ottawa and are currently stowed in the shuttle Discovery.
"NASA identified a number of years ago that a key technology for space exploration was what they call automated rendezvous and docking sensors," said Mike Kearns, Neptec's vice-president for space exploration systems.
"This would allow exploration to the moon, Mars and beyond," he said.
Neptec has built a business of supplying cameras and sensors to spaceships (and, more recently, helicopters). This time, NASA is testing Neptec's TriDAR sensors. The name comes from lidar, which means the use of lasers in a radar-like way.
These new space eyes could have a lot of different jobs:
NASA wants to have a spaceship dig up some Martian soil and bring it back to Earth. This requires docking in orbit: A small lander would descend to Mars, get its rocks and return to dock with the mother ship, which remains in orbit the whole time.
"It has to be very accurate in the docking with the mother ship," Kearns said.
Ground controllers can't guide a robotic ship to dock in Mars's orbit. It takes 15 minutes for the signals to travel from here to there, which is too long.
Private companies such as Space-X are developing unmanned ships that would deliver cargo to the International Space Station.
Unmanned spaceships could also deliver supplies to human bases on Mars or the moon, and the sensors have already had successful tests, again with NASA, for robotic rovers for Mars and the moon.
Humans are interested in using the Neptec tools, too.
The TriDAR is not considered a critical tool for this shuttle mission. It's just being tested. Yet astronauts training for this flight kept stealing a look at the TriDAR display during practice runs because it gave them an extra view of their simulated approach to the space station.
"We had not expected astronauts to be interested," Kearns said. "So that's another use that we had not anticipated."
Weather postponed Discovery's scheduled launch early today for at least 48 hours.