Brad Sanko

speaker

81 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 8 Jul

Brad Sanko’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Short Wave · NASA's race against time to rescue a falling satellite · 8 Jul 2026 podcast

And this is for two reasons.

One is because we actually don't know what state Swift is in.

We haven't seen it in 22 years.

And we want to verify that the observatory all is behaving like we think it should and make sure that the points where the robot is going to grab on to Swift are the right ones.

And the second reason is because the actual capture itself is all done autonomously.

And so the Lynx spacecraft has a bunch of cameras on board.

It needs to train those cameras in the same way that like a self-driving car is trained.

So that it knows, okay, I'm this far away.

I need to fire these thrusters, get a little bit closer.

My robotic arms are here.

I need to maneuver them in this direction.

All that is happening using computer vision software that's on board.

And we need actual images of Swift in different orientations and different lighting conditions to train that capability.

Would you say you're cautiously optimistic about Swift's chances?

Absolutely.

100%.

The fact that we have gotten this far, I think, is remarkable.

You know, there is something on orbit that is, you know, working thus far pretty well.

That leads me to think that, you know, we're going to continue to do well.

But still, we have a lot of challenging things ahead of us.

Showing 61–80 of 81 · page 4 of 5