Project aims to move docking into space

摘要

A project at the Surrey Space Centre (SSC) is aiming to dock two cubesats in orbit, with a view to eventually enabling mission upgrades and construction of modular devices. STRaND-2 - a collaboration between Surrey University and Surrey Satellite Technology (SSTL) - will use spatial-awareness technology from Microsoft's Kinect console peripheral for docking. 'Cubesats are very handy and they have opened up the field of demonstrating technologies for a very low cost,' SSTL project lead Shaun Kenyon told The Engineer. 'But at the same time they are really, really small, so if we can dock two or three, or however many, together then you can build a more capable system in space.' The project will build on experience gained by STRaND-1, a cubesat powered by an Android Google Nexus 1 smartphone.