Overview
- A compact Caltech payload called ASTRA autonomously picked, placed and joined components to build a third truss bay in low Earth orbit, demonstrating in-orbit assembly without astronaut intervention.
- The demonstrator did not complete its planned 1.4-meter reflector before the mission ended, leaving the antenna unfinished and the effort positioned as a proof of concept rather than a finished system.
- Operators faced limited daily contact windows of roughly 15 minutes and observed unexpected in-orbit behaviors, so teams repeatedly tested fixes on an identical flight spare in a Caltech lab before uplinking commands.
- ASTRA packs a robotic arm, motorized dispensers, an assembly plate and onboard computing into roughly a one-cubic-meter box and uses a lightweight perforated Kapton reflective film developed with the University of Pennsylvania.
- Funded by DARPA’s NOM4D program, the test points to next steps of refining hardware and software to scale the approach toward larger antennas, telescopes and solar arrays that cannot be launched fully assembled