In a few years, the exterior of the International Space Station could be crawling with geckos.
It鈥檚 not an alien invasion, or the plot of a low-budget sci-fi movie. The robotic geckos could follow from an experiment NASA launched to the International Space Station on Tuesday aboard an uncrewed Cygnus spacecraft.
The devices use tiny artificial hairs that replicate the ones geckos use to climb walls. They are designed to help astronauts to keep track of objects in zero gravity, and enable robots to crawl around a spacecraft to inspect and repair it.
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The bots have already been tested on parabolic aircraft flights, where they grabbed and manipulated 10-kilogram and 100-kg objects during 20-second periods of microgravity. On the ISS trip, astronauts will test the system by attaching it to surfaces inside the space station. They will attach five devices in a range of sizes to 30 surfaces at different angles to check how well they grip. The devices will be left in place anywhere from two weeks to a year.
鈥淕eckos are nature鈥檚 most amazing climbers,鈥� says lead researcher of NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. 鈥淭hey go from the floor to the ceiling in 2 seconds. And they can stick to almost anything.鈥�
Geckos feet are not sticky to the touch, but instead use millions of tiny hairs that grip surfaces using charged van der Waals forces. Such hairs give the Gecko Gripper an advantage over the Velcro astronauts now use to secure objects.
Parness also imagines more ambitious purposes. 鈥淲e can grab satellites to repair them, service them,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e can also grab space garbage and try and clear it out of the way. We鈥檙e interested here in making robots that could crawl around on the outside of say, the space station, do repair, do inspection.鈥�
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