Satellites play vital roles in everyday life. From weather observations to navigation to communications, Earth-orbiting spacecraft are now so prevalent they could easily be taken for granted. A team at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, collaborating with counterparts at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., recently demonstrated groundbreaking technology that could add additional years of service to satellites.

Engineers at Kennedy are performing the design, development and qualification testing of the critical hypergolic propellant transfer system for a simulated servicing satellite under the leadership of Tom Aranyos,technical integration manager in the spaceport's Fluids and Propulsion Division and Gary Snyder, project manager for the satellite servicing project at the space center.

"Kennedy's role is to develop a propulsion transfer assembly in collaboration with Goddard," Aranyos said. "We are actually involved in designing, developing and testing satellite hardware that could be used in the future to refuel a satellite.

Benjamin Reed, deputy project manager of Goddards Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office (SSCO), expressed appreciation for resourceful efforts of the group at the Florida spaceport in support of the project.

The Kennedy contingent was extraordinarily creative and innovative in the ways that they repurposed shuttle hardware, miraculously negotiated facilities in extraordinarily tight scheduling pockets and designed new technologies to match an immensely challenging problem set, he said.

Since April 2011, engineers at Kennedy have partnered with the SSCO at Goddard to develop robotic satellite servicing technologies necessary to bring in-orbit inspection, repair, refueling, component replacement and assembly capabilities to spacecraft needing aid. The project could also lead to life extension or re-purposing in Earth orbit or applications beyond.

According to Pepper Phillips, NASA's director of Engineering and Technology at Kennedy, the Florida spaceport's skills in preparing vehicles for launch now are leading to its employees being asked to support development of in orbit satellite servicing capabilities.

"Kennedy has a long and storied history of employees processing launch vehicles and spacecraft," he said. "Now other centers are looking to apply that expertise in designing satellites."

Brian Nufer, a fluids engineer in the Fluids Engineering Branch of NASA Engineering and Technology, noted that SSCO wanted to take advantage of those years of experience in loading propellants and apply them to designing related components for a simulated robotic servicing satellite.

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Groundbreaking Technology May Add Years to Earth Orbiting Satellites