Increasing complexity and costs of satellite missions promote the idea of looking for opportunities to extend the operational lifetime or to improve the performance of a satellite instead of simply replacing it by a new one. Satellites in orbit can severely be affected by ageing, limited fuel source, or degradation of their hardware components. Also the disposal of spacecraft after the end of l...

On-Orbit Servicing (OOS) is not only an option for the repair and the upgrade of space assets that suffer from technical failures but might also be a promising business case, e.g. extending the lifetime of geostationary communication satellites. Another example of robotic service operations would be the servicing of low-earth orbit satellites. Currently, this expertise is being developed at GSO...

We consider the problem of scheduling jobs online, where jobs may be served partially in order to optimize the overall use of the machines. Service requests arrive online to be executed immediately; the scheduler must decide how long and if it will run a job (that is, it must fix the Quality of Service level of the job) at the time of arrival of the job: preemption is not allowed. We give lower...

A major subset of on-orbit servicing (OOS) is unmanned satellite servicing missions using robotics and automation technologies, which is the focus here. To date various concepts for onorbit servicing of satellites have been developed and investigated, mostly driven by the technological challenges involved. Now, under the label “OOS” such activities have a renaissance. However, no operational OO...

This paper explores the significance of dirt in the work of technicians who service and repair private cars. Rather than being useful in understanding how dirt is dealt with, the historical and anthropological analyses of dirt are shown to be overly concerned with cultural significance and the idea that dirt is no more than ‘matter out of place’. Such accounts suppress the more common sense app...

Parallel and distributed systems archi tectures support parallel I O components Caching has been applied to distributed I O subsystems as a standard solution to the problems of fastening data accessibility and increasing data reliability Cache consistency mechanisms have been implemented in order to in uence the cache usefulness in a posi tive way This paper presents a new caching tech nique ba...

The study provides a description of what Lean means in a service context, focused on the energy sector. The study covered a range of operational processes, including TQM, Six Sigma and freestanding benchmarking and Kaizen initiatives. A divide between managers actively implementing Lean and those that are not is clear in both survey results and interviews; this divide is driven wider by the mis...

-A highly effective predictive/preview display technique for telerobotic servicing in space under several seconds communication time delay has been demonstrated on a large laboratory scale in May 1993, involving the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as the simulated ground control station and, 2500 miles away, the Goddard Space Flight Center as the simulated satellite servicing set-up. The technique is...

To work effectively with legacy code, software engineers need to understand a legacy computer program’s culture—the combination of the programmer’s background, the hardware environment, and the programming techniques that guided its creation. Software systems typically pass through a series of stages. During the initial development stage, software developers create a first functioning version o...