(Sound of robot air jets)
Welcome to NASA's PlanetQuest Podcast, Episode 3. I'm Dr. Jo Pitesky.
Under a velvet black dome studded with sparkling stars, a lone figure glides gracefully, tilting and whirling across a shining floor. Instead of music, however, there's the slight hiss of compressed air.
Standing about waist high and weighing a chunky 700 pounds, the rotund robot looks more like something from "Star Wars" than "Shall We Dance?" Yet, as it floats on a paper-thin cushion of air, it is testing the initial moves in a complex choreography that researchers eventually plan to duplicate in space as part of the search for Earthlike planets.
To prepare for that future debut in space, the robot is rehearsing on Earth in JPL's Formation Flying Technology Laboratory. One of the choreographers for this cosmic ballet is Daniel Scharf, a senior engineer at JPL.
"The Formation Control Testbed is a robotic testbed to demonstration formation flying technology as much as possible on the ground before we use it in flight. The primary application in flight is discovering Earthlike planets circling other stars."
These testbed robots are the Earthbound forebears to NASA's future Terrestrial Planet Finder mission. It will be the first mission
(Scharf:) To actually detect planets the size of Earth circling other stars, we need telescopes hundreds of meters across. This is something we can't build with current technology. And so what we do is use formation flying; we put many little telescopes on separate spacecraft and fly them together as if they were one large telescope.
Once all three the robots are in place, they will move together in a precise, coordinated formation, with their movements controlled by an onboard computer. To navigate, the robots' star-tracking camera locks onto a simulated star field in the same way that the space mission will look onto real stars in the future.
When the testbed's three robots have their synchronized performance down pat, the show will be ready to go on the road - and into space.
For NASA's PlanetQuest, I'm Dr. Jo Pitesky.
