Awards & Nominations

The Hive has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

The Challenge | Design by Nature

Design an autonomous free-flyer to inspect a spacecraft for damage from Micro-Meteoroid and Orbital Debris (MMOD).

The Hive

Like bees protect their hive, our little cameras are ejected from the spacecraft beyond it and, disposed as a circle, shoot a sequence of images while the latter pass through the scanning area. Thanks to this system, all type of damages will be detected.

The Hive

In order to find a solution to the challenge which we have decided to face, "Designed by Nature", we thought about what we call "Tele-bees": these little cameras present the following features:

- Normal and infrared functions in case of space's darkness;

- Variable zoom depending on the spacecraft size;

- Shot frames are sent immediately to the onboard computer;

- Two jets of compressed air for deceleration and then approach to the spacecraft for their recovery.

Let's talk about the functioning: the spacecraft will be equipped with a belt containing reclinable guns whose task is to shoot our tele-bees. Cameras will get in a circle position in front of the vehicle and then will decelerate thanks to the first compressed air's jet. So, each corner of the spacecraft will be photographed while it passes through the scanning area formed by the Tele-bees (their number depends on the size of the vehicle). After this process, the second jet of compressed air, located on the top of each device (with an angle of 90° in relation to the first one), is activated in order to approach to the spacecraft and, then, to be recovered. The recovery system could be based on the already-existing operation of space rendezvous.



(RESOURCES: videos about space operation like the rendezvous and general concept about physical laws in the inertial systems)

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SpaceApps is a NASA incubator innovation program.