Before anyone can tow away a dead satellite, someone has to go and look at it. That spacecraft just launched
Otter, a 335 kg spacecraft from Starfish Space, went up on 1 October on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare launch, flying the first debris inspection NASA has funded a company to do. From 2027 it's due to fly within hundreds of metres of up to four defunct US objects, such as dead satellites or spent rocket stages, and measure how fast each one tumbles, around which axis, and what state its surface is in: the kind of thing a future removal mission would need to know before trying to grab one. No docking this time, and NASA hasn't named the targets yet.
Full Story: https://orbinauts.com/news/nasas-first-commercial-debris-inspector-has-launched/
u/OrbinautsHq — 11 days ago