Foreign media reports that NASA has just completed the first round of testing of the International Space Station (ISS) on-orbit fuel refilling project, which aims to verify the feasibility of providing on-orbit fuel refueling for satellite and deep space missions . It is reported that NASA Satellite Service Project Department equipped RRM3 with three sets of tools to simulate the storage tank transfer operation experiment of low-temperature fuels such as liquid methane, hydrogen and oxygen. As manned and unmanned deep space missions are receiving increasing attention, as well as providing satellite maintenance to reduce space debris, on-orbit fueling has aroused great interest among researchers from all walks of life.
MFT2 tool operated by Dextre (picture from: NASA, via New Atlas)
Up to now, any space mission must carry enough fuel to launch the mission. But this means that the spacecraft must add extra weight, sometimes even as expensive as the booster needed to send it into space.
On the one hand, NASA's Artemis mission uses a larger rocket than the classic Saturn V, which will be extremely expensive. On the other hand, the duration of the satellite mission is severely limited by the fuel storage tanks it carries, and once exhausted, it must be scrapped.
In consideration of volume and cost, the on-rail fuel filling scheme is very necessary. According to actual needs, relevant agencies can launch like a series of smaller rockets, or collect the required elements from the moon or even nearby asteroids, and then transport the cryogenic propellant to space.
Since 2018, RRM3 and the Canadian Dextre robot have been installed outside the International Space Station. Researchers have been carefully developing how to transfer cryogenic liquids to satellite storage tanks and how to store them for several months without boiling.
The RRM3 ground operations team at Goddard Space Flight Center (Photo: NASA)
According to NASA, when a failure occurred that required the discharge of fuel, it had to abandon the low-temperature test using liquid methane. After that, the project team has focused on the tools used in the transfer.
Specifically, it is a coolant maintenance tool that connects the source tank and the receiver tank, a multi-function tool (MFT2) for operating the low-temperature transfer adapter, and a visual inspection rotatable robot (VIPIR2) for checking that the refrigerant between the tanks has been properly transferred ).
To this end, Dextre took on the task of using MFT2 to take out the refrigerant coupling adapter and put it into the adapter port, and then the RRM3 module would take over the remaining refueling task.
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