During his Master's project, Mathias Benn from DTU Space developed a technology that enables two spaceships to rendezvous and dock in space - entirely without human intervention. A technology that will play an important role for future missions to the Moon and Mars. In 2009 the technology will be sent into orbit with the Prisma mission, which will be the first ever to demonstrate the scope of autonomous rendezvous and docking.
"Autonomous docking of spacecraft will be one of the future's new technologies within space research,“ says Mathias Benn.
The mission
The German and French space agencies are also involved in the mission with similar technologies involved in the experiments. "However, Mathias Benn's system is the most compact and robust of the three," says professor John Leif Jørgensen, who has been Mathias' supervisor for his Master's project.
For experimental purposes, the technology will accompany the Swedish-led Prisma mission, which is to demonstrate and test new technologies for the future of space travel. The mission's primary goal is to carry out manoeuvring experiments in space, where two spacecrafts must find each other and link up.
Manoeuvring
The rendezvous and docking techniques will be used for missions where several spacecraft are to communicate and interact with each other with high precision. This applies to such as landing on and retrieving samples from other planets or for objectives that involve delivering laboratory equipment to the international space station, ISS. Docking and rendezvous techniques will therefore be used in the future for both manned and unmanned spacecraft. Today, spacecraft docking and rendezvous systems are based on several different measurement methods and require human intervention by astronauts or operators on Earth. In the future, technology developed by Mathias will enable advanced methods based on one autonomous system that will ensure much greater precision without any human intervention.