Test Flight: Clockwork Starfish in Space
This is a technology demonstration of a prototype system for sampling material on asteroid surfaces and returning them to Earth. In essence, the clockwork starfish swim and feed within a sea of simulated asteroid rocks in zero gravity, collecting samples.
The Clockwork Starfish are released into free flight during a suborbital space flight on the Blue Origin New Shepard spacecraft. Samples of loose rocky material streaming through magnetized collectors on the Starfish is trapped when the starfish turn inside-out.
The Starfish in finer-grained sample materials successfully collected nearly 50% of its mass, retaining it all the way through landing and disassembly of the experiment. The Starfish sampling the coarse-grained material did not achieve eversion — the locking mechanism holding it closed during launch and deployment was jammed closed. We think this was due to being left stored in a “closed” state during the 2-week delay after the original test flight attempt was scrubbed. The Starfish were not designed to be stored in this state, but there was no easy way to remove them from the chambers and disable them after scrub.
Our initial concept studies place a flight Starfish, with all its necessary onboard systems, in the size range of a 1U Cubesat, but tetrahedral. What we have now is a demonstration of this sampler technology in as simplified a version as we could manage. We now need to think about the other systems we would need on board to achieve the full mission profile. We’ll need a deployment system for dozens of Starfish, a compact and non-contaminating propulsion system that can “hop” the samplers back up off the surface to a waiting parent spacecraft, and a system for recovering and stowing the Starfish into a sample return canister.
In a mission setting, these tiny devices could use cold gas thrusters to hop back up to a waiting parent spacecraft, where they would be stowed along with dozens of their siblings for return to Earth.
