GREENBELT – Tucked away in a cavernous building at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, an 11-foot robot arm spends its days showing off for a team of engineers.
It shines its lights, locates equipment, flexes its grippers, loosens screws and even wields power tools — just like an astronaut can.
Engineers here have spent the last six months putting the robotic arm through its paces to see if it can service the Hubble Space Telescope. They do not know if the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will end up servicing Hubble at all, let alone if it will entrust such work to a robot.
But that does not mean their work has been wasted, they say.
“Robotics is a key feature of deep-space exploration,” said Frank Cepollina, a Goddard official who oversees work on Hubble. The potential of robotics technology goes “well, well beyond” servicing Hubble, he said.
Scientists explored the possibility of using a robot to service Hubble remotely after the space shuttle Columbia exploded in early 2003, leaving NASA officials and lawmakers skittish about sending up another shuttle.
Without a mission to service the fragile equipment on Hubble, the space telescope could shut down, possibly as soon as 2007.
Whether to send a robot or an astronaut to service Hubble — or whether to simply bring it down prematurely — has been the subject of intense debate in the science community and Congress. The president has only provided enough money to pull the space telescope out of orbit, but Maryland lawmakers have vowed to have Hubble serviced.
Incoming NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said during his confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill this month that he wanted to take a new look at a Hubble servicing mission, but did not want to let a robot do the work.
A Goddard spokeswoman said nothing about the robotic-arm project has changed since Griffin’s testimony, but she would not comment on its long-term outlook.
In the meantime, the Goddard engineers have continued to work with the robotic arm, which was built in Canada and trucked down to Greenbelt in October for testing.
Sitting in front of a bank of flat-panel screens, with a joystick to remotely operate the robot in front of them, the engineers set the arm about its delicate work. They either control its actions directly or watch as it makes programmed motions, bending at joints that they call its shoulder, elbow and wrist.
The arm is actually a version of a different machine that is still in Canada, attached to a robotic torso and another arm. Taken together, that robot’s entire body weighs in at 3,000 pounds. The testing arm at Goddard is suspended by pulleys to help it handle heavy tools.
Regardless of what it ends up being used for, Cepollina said he is confident that robotics have a future in space work in general.
Using pre-existing robotic technology and training it to work on Hubble, Cepollina said, “We’ve integrated things together to deal with the future.”
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