DART nearly a bullseye

Glad to hear that NASA's DART mission was a near 100% success. Now on to a
full blown autonomous rendezvous and docking demo of two unmanned NASA
spacecraft. Hope NASA can pull this off soon.

The Soviets, of course, pioneered autonomous rendezvous (and docking)
procedures and have used them to support their Salyut and Mir space
stations. And Russian equipment (the Kurs system) was used to autonomously
dock the ISS Service Module to FGB/Unity assembly in July 2000.

The Russkies had to try several times before they worked out the bugs and
performed the world's first automated rendezvous and docking of two unmanned
spacecraft (Cosmos 186 and 188) in October 1967. Gee, that was nearly 40
years ago.

Later
Ray Schmitt