Space Force awards $11.5M grant to UC to fix orbiting satellites

UC Professor Ou Ma and his research team have been working on the vexing problem for several years. When satellites break, which is surprisingly often, they can become billion-dollar paperweights that put other satellites at risk.

“If you find a car having a problem on the road, you can tow it back to the garage for fixing,” Ma said. “If a satellite goes wrong in orbit, you can’t take it back. You have to live with it. And some problems can even kill the entire mission.”

Many services require physical interactions with the satellites, but an inadvertent bump can send both the servicing and the serviced satellites rotating wildly away from each other.

“It’s a huge risk. You don’t want to make a capture or repair in space without extremely high confidence. So you must thoroughly test the operation in a lab environment,” Ma said.

“This award to Professor Ma is evidence of the value the U.S. Space Force places on UC’s research expertise and accomplishments,” said Patrick Limbach, UC’s vice president for research. “This award will leverage UC’s existing investments in the Space Research Institute for Research and Discovery and ensure our institution continues to be a leader in this field.”

The project also will demonstrate new robotic arm cooperative control technologies. Ma is uniquely qualified for leading this task. He helped develop the robotic arms aboard the International Space Station and has worked on space robotics projects with NASA, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Canadian Space Agency and the German Aerospace Center.

The project builds on UC’s work in advanced manufacturing and robotics, UC College of Engineering and Applied Science Dean John Weidner said.

“Being able to do this work in the most challenging environment possible will serve us well for terrestrial applications,” Weidner said.

UC will work with Clemson University and the University of Arizona along with four aerospace companies, including Sierra Lobo, Inc., based in Fremont, Ohio.

UC has a storied tradition in aerospace science and engineering. After setting foot on the moon, the late astronaut Neil Armstrong left NASA to teach at UC. Many UC graduates have launched careers at NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, SpaceX and other aerospace research firms across the country.

“It’s significant funding that shows the excellence of our program,” said Paul Orkwis, head of UC’s Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics.

“You hear people say, ‘it’s not rocket science.’ Well, this is rocket science. It’s hard,” Orkwis said. “Virtually all the work done in space today is autonomous and at a distance. But what we’re learning affects everything we do from cell phones to GPS.”

The grant will support the research work of 16 graduate and undergraduate students per year at UC and its two partner universities, Ma said.

Ma’s collaborators include aerospace engineering professors Donghoon Kim, Kelly Cohen and Rajnikant Sharma. Cohen and Ma are part of the UC’s Space Research Institute for Discovery and Exploration, which works with a large group of faculty and students on a variety of projects ranging from unmanned and autonomous vehicles to supersonic propulsion.

Featured image at top: The space shuttle Discovery deploys a satellite during a 1985 mission. Photo/NASA