Working

We have developed a improvised docking mechanism to ease building space colonies or stations in the space itself by providing a Multiple Stations-Multiple Spacecrafts system. The solution uses things like very high speed dedicated LiFi communication links and LASER beams between spacecraft and stations to achieve autonomous rendezvous and docking.

Message Bit Format for Communication - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PzYh8bLrKKZHdBo1GssVprBQm-WHDMA1/view?usp=sharing

Also, an autonomous spacecraft aligning system using four laser beams transmitting PWM modulated sine waves, where the sine wave is of 0, 90, 180, 270 degrees of phase respectively, thus creating a quadrature. An unique sine wave frequency is assigned to the spacecraft by Docking Management Module (DMM) at the time when docking permission is granted. Each station has a laser sensor array which unfolds on activation signal from DMM. The sensors (offset sensors) tell us the angle at which laser is incident.

So, the information we have is 1) Distance from spacecraft to station , 2) which sensor in the array gets hit with laser beam, 3) Angle of incidence 4) Which laser beam (identified by their phase) hits which part of the sensor array. From this, the orientation of spacecraft can be precisely calculated and the translation, roll, pitch, yaw and their magnitudes required to align the spacecraft with docking station can be calculated. These are sent as commands to spacecraft and it aligns with the station. After it comes further into proximity, it is pulled towards docking station by electromagnets and when the mechanical latches (in the structure approved by International Docking Standards) are locked and docking is complete, current is reduced to zero in electromagnets. The cargo from the spacecraft is unloaded with help of robotic arms and instead of creating debris, the spacecraft body is used as a part of the space colony/ space station itself by designing spacecrafts that can fold onto themselves in a way beneficial to the space station.

Importance

1) It is always preferable to send multiple small spacecrafts instead of one large one when it comes to building things in space. For these systems, it's not feasible to keep spacecrafts lined up and unload cargo in a serial fashion. We need to work parallelly to build things faster. So, there will be need for multiple docking stations and a control mechanism for the same.

2) Also, we need a solution which can avoid high amount of debris it will be producing and use it instead, which also enables us to use resources in a optimum way.

3) We cannot have a system with many spacecrafts controlled by humans for a process like docking, thus we need an autonomous intelligent system

Our solution works on these problems and solves them efficiently.

Our Goal

Our aim is to achieve a self-reliant space colony and also a self-reliant mechanism to build it and repair it whenever needed.

Future work

Exact designs for spacecrafts and stations and also folding mechanisms, and combining the science that we've learned with the ideas that we had throughout all these challenge process.