MOSAR : Modular spacecraft assembly and reconfiguration demonstrator

Letier, Pierre and Yan, Xiu T. and Deremetz, Mathieu and Bianco, Alessandro and Grunwald, Gerhard and Roa, Maximo and Krenn, Rainer and Arancón, Miguel Muñoz and Dissaux, Pierre and Casarrubios, Juan Sánchez García and Lucini, Rodrigo Ruiz and Filippis, Luca De and Porcelluzzi, Giuseppe and Post, Mark and Walshe, Michael and Perryman, Philip (2019) MOSAR : Modular spacecraft assembly and reconfiguration demonstrator. In: 15th Symposium on Advanced Space Technologies in Robotics and Automation, 2019-05-27 - 2019-05-28, Space Research and Technology Centre of the European Space Agency.

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Abstract

With rapid development of space systems in recent years and their limited lives, it is imperative that a sustainable space development approach is developed to support more affordable access to space for all stakeholders. The European Commission hence funded the MOSAR project which aims to create a new paradigm technology to address this increasing challenge. This paper provides an overview of this technology’s preliminary development to enable on-orbit servicing. Building on five successful projects which collectively created all required common building blocks for both planetary explorations and in-orbit missions, a novel architecture is proposed to create a walking manipulator to demonstrate its unique capability in both space system assembly and on-orbit servicing. Preliminary design concepts of a walking manipulator and spacecraft modules are shown. A dedicated simulator is also developed to evaluate the proposed novel architecture for these targeted applications.