The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is sponsoring an international conference to open dialogue about on-orbit satellite servicing.

Fostering Sustainable Satellite Servicing will be held on Tuesday, June 26 in Arlington, VA.

DARPA pioneered on-orbit satellite servicing with the Orbital Express demonstrator in 2007. DARPA is continuing to pursued on-orbit servicing in the Phoenix program, which seeks to demonstrate technologies for harvesting and reusing components from retired, non-working satellites in geosynchronous orbit.

DARPA Phoenix geosynchronous satellite servicing mission

DARPA believes that widespread adoption of on-orbit servicing would benefit from discussions regarding a range of technical and non-technical issues, including policy, legal and other constraints.

Dave Barnhart, DARPA program manager for Phoenix said that may serve as as a model for future on-orbit servicing activities.

Information about the conference can be found here.

 

Written by Astro1 on April 27th, 2012 , Events

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