A very versatile octopus robot

For secret and not so secret space work.

This is an octopus robot, and it literally has octopus arms, it is on the international space station, that is why you see it floating, as if it were a kind of character that appears in some video games that accompany the protagonist, those types of robots that appear floating are also used as assistants to the astronauts, but this one in particular has a different mission.

What we are seeing is the REACCH system has the best of an octopus robot and a gecko lizard, because the arms unfold, as you are seeing, like the tentacles of an octopus, but it also has in them, I don't know if you notice the black part, such as pads with micropatterns that allow them to stick or adhere to surfaces in a similar way to how the legs of a geckos do. Geckos are these lizards that are capable of climbing through glass.

There are even gloves that they have designed to be able to climb glass like geckos, the most amazing thing is that this robot and others that they are developing may have the key to getting rid of one of the biggest problems that we have right now in space, it is space debris, because it is designed to capture objects in space, whether it is a satellite that is drifting, a piece of space garbage, hold firmly to it and it has two functions, in this case, it can direct it safely in a position, for example, a satellite that you have, you have a company and you have a communications satellite, but it is in too low an orbit because it has been falling over time.

You can order a service from this robot, the robot will take the satellite and raise it to a higher position where it can continue working with that satellite for longer, because many satellites stop having activity when they decay in their orbit and begin to reach the dangerous zone, the zone where they begin to rub against atmospheric gases, lose speed and fall to the ground.

Apart from that, there is all the space debris, there are millions of man-made objects in Earth orbit, we almost have a space debris belt, and it also has a very curious, very very curious history. This robot began as an experiment at the University of Southern California, funded, by eye, funded by the DARPA Advanced Research Projects Agency, the same one where the Internet emerged.

The ecological function of cleaning up space debris is very good, but you don't have to be very naive to realize that in the same way that you can capture and deorbit an inactive satellite, you can do the same with an active satellite of an enemy power. Of course, I'm not saying that this company is going to do it, but that the armies of the superpowers want to have similar robots in space, I'm very sure that they do and that they will have them in the coming years if they don't already have them.