Space Station Assistant
Following the 2003 Columbia disaster, NASA canceled the last remaining Hubble repair mission by shuttle astronauts because of safety concerns and considered sending Dextre up to do the job.
The shuttle flight was restored after a change at NASA's helm—it's scheduled for late summer—and Dextre went back to being a space station assistant.
Dextre—which cost more than 200 million U.S. dollars—was created by the same Canadian team that built the space shuttle and space station robot arms.
Equipped with a tool holster, Dextre is designed to assist spacewalking astronauts and, ultimately, to take over some of their dangerous outdoor work.
Dextre can pivot at the waist, and has seven joints per arm. Its hands, or grippers, have built-in socket wrenches, cameras, and lights. Only one arm is designed to move at a time to keep the robot stable and avoid a two-arm collision. The robot has no face or legs and, with its long arms, certainly doesn't look human.
Space station astronauts will be able to control Dextre, as will flight controllers on the ground. The robot will be attached at times to the end of the space station arm, and also be able to ride by itself along the space station arm's railway.
Not Necessarily a "He"
Canadian officials said they're convinced Dextre could have pulled off the Hubble repair job and should have no problems replacing old batteries and other space station parts.
"It's quite surprising what a robot like Dextre can do with its sense of touch and its precision," said Daniel Rey, a Canadian Space Agency engineer who heads the project.
Dextre has only three tools, for now, versus the more than a hundred tools available to spacewalking astronauts, Rey said.
It will probably take months to learn how to properly use the robot. Its first real job could come next year.
Linnehan, who worked on Hubble in 2002, wonders just how much Dextre will be able to do.
Even though it's suited for space station maintenance, astronauts are faster, Linnehan said. As for Hubble, he said Dextre cannot compare to a human repairman because it lacks fine motor control, and cannot think and react to problems that might crop up.
That said, Linnehan acknowledges it's "a cool project" that reminds him of Japanese animation shows from decades past, namely Gigantor, the space-age robot.
NASA officials agree that working with Dextre should help astronauts learn how robots operate in space—and that could be helpful future exploration.
Dextre, by the way, isn't necessarily a "he."
"I tend to use 'he' because I think Dextre is a masculine name," Rey said. "But it's a robot. It's tele-operated. It doesn't have artificial intelligence yet. So I need to be more careful when I say 'he.' "
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