The Engineer Online - NASA demonstrates Mini AERCam

Article date: 6/15/05

This little robot looks like something out of a Douglas Adams book... but it makes a lot of sense to have a "mini autonomous extravehicular robotic camera" to be able to check out parts of the spacecraft that can't be seen by a camera on a stick. It uses a "rechargeable xenon gas propulsion system" -- aack, that's expensive. Xenon, if I recall correctly, is pulled out of the atmosphere, but you have to suck up a lot of atmosphere to get a little bit of Xenon. So with this, the imaging is the easy part the docking station and propulsion are slightly more tricky.

Here's the NASA page for the little guy.