Slashdot Mirror
Space Station & Shuttle Evade Debris
T.Hobbes writes: "There's an article at the BBC about the shuttle had to take evasive maneuvers to avoid the close (5km) transit of some rocket debris, and how the fuel consumed has cut short the shuttle's stay in orbit by one day. NASA also has an article about it." I know that minor maneuvers are common, but this one seems like a rather major move. Anyone want to bet on how long it will be before we have to establish some sort of clean-up effort in space?
The Slashdot article doesn't make it quite clear enough that they weren't trying to keep the shuttle clear of the debris - they were trying to keep the space station clear of debris. That's why it consumed so much fuel (they had to budge the entire space station 3/4 of a mile.) It's easy to move the shuttle, much harder to use the shuttle as a tugboat.
What's your damage, Heather?
That's what you get when you leave your garbage in orbit! Where'd they think it would go? the moon? Around orbit is just like that place behind your couch where you throw trash, no one sees it but eventually it will become a problem. I dunno what they were thinking.
There is a more detailed article here.
James White wrote about this problem in 1964.
I could easily believe that someone wrote about the problem before that.
Deadly Litter (c) 1964 by James White,
ISBN 0-345-29640-0
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
That's what you get when you leave your garbage in orbit! ... I dunno what they were thinking.
As with most issues in the space program, this is not as simple as it sounds. The debris in question is an old Soviet-era rocket booster, which travels into orbit along with whatever payload it's carrying. Unless some action is taken, it will circle the earth for hundreds of years until the extremely rareified upper atmosphere creates enough drag to bring it down. In order to remove these objects from orbit, you would have to install a retro-rocket system to bring it down on command, which would introduce complexity and cost quite a lot of weight. The debris has to come down somewhere, and if the de-orbiting device malfunctions, it will come down over Chicago rather than some isolated patch of the Pacific. Furthermore, most of the debris that people are worried about are not huge boosters, but tiny rice-grain-sized specs, which are impossible to track and account for.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
For some reason this reminds me of the movie Armageddon.
how long? i'd guess now is an excellent time to start thinking about it. I read there is quite a problem already. But like most things, if mankind can figure a way out of it, or better, around it in this instance, I'm sure we will. Then some day something BIG will crash up there, and then all of a sudden people will do something about it (a la airport security)
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
The Shooting Gallery
Fuck 'im up, Tim! His views are invalid! -Pirate Corp$
I'm sure politicians will only realize how much we need to clean up space after a shuttle crew dies from a collision with space debris. I mean right now our money is much better spent on that missle defence system. I mean after Sept 11th it's clearly missles we need to defend against, right?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Space junk really isn't that much of an issue since its orderly - Im pretty sure they have known about this object for a long time [years], and since the trajectory and orbit of all known space junk is static, noboby is going to be surprised by flying banana peel. However, when you get more than one object large enough to have gravitaional pull on its own, I suppose the calculations will become more and more complex and you end up having to put up some serious timex watches in stuff you put up there. When that time comes, a small british company has already made a tiny inexpensive cleaning bot for earth-orbiting debris [BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_7 97000/797338.stm]
/penhead
Star wars was just a coverup for an intergalactic garbage disposal unit!
Yahiko
Everything I say is a lie.
Except that. And that. And that. And that.
Cleaning up near earth space would be extrememly difficult and costly. Going out at grabbing just one or two dead satellites or pieces of junk would require a separate mission. Deorbiting large quantities of debris at once would be ideal, but then there is the problem of differentiating between junk and working satellites, as well as the rain of metal through the atmosphere.
----
Striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap, will be the leap ho
I think they already avoid any explosion that makes a lot of nontraceable fragments. (The Gorbachev's asymmetric answer to US Star Wars program was reportedly a bunch of asymmetric nuts to be sent to collision with US ICBM). The problem is that the used rockets will orbit the Earth indefinitely. As I know this problem is being solved: during one of shuttle flights it was shown that the tethered satellite tends to induce currents along the tether which gives a lot of electricity and creates drag which lowers the orbit without any need of propellant. You only attach the cable and electrode to every booster and eject it after use (Or, if you like, pump electricity into the cable and obtain the propulsion without propellant).
The real problem is that space junk leads to more space junk.
Space junk by itself isn't too bad. It's just some stuff that's floating around Earth's orbit.
The problem is that this space junk will collide with other space junk, leading to smaller, faster moving pieces of junk. This small, undetectable junk will smack into good equipment, leading to even more space junk. Before you know it, there's a chain reaction, and near earth orbit becomes an unsuitable wasteland of high velocity particles.
Just what we don't need.
And trust me, it's one thing to get and send down a spent rocket. It's a bit harder to remove a few thousand small shards of aluminum, paint and ceramic.
There is an immediate need to de-orbit as much space junk as possbile.
To shoot debris where? You will end up with a lot more pieces of smaller debris which are just as dangerous.
0x or or snor perron?!
Wonder if they'll be using e-cons to clean it up ;)
"Anyone want to bet on how long it will be before we have to establish some sort of clean-up effort in space?"
Personally, I don't think it is needed for a long time. First of all, more communications will probably be moved down to earth using high-flying aircrafts over longer time, unless somebody (Like the guys who use microwaves and laser to fire stuff into the sky) with a cheaper launch technique succeeds. Secondly, its not actually THAT big a problem, and a clean up effort will most likely be a major undertaking. I bet it's cheaper to protect and move spacecraft away from the trash rather than removing it.
IF they were to do a cleanup, I bet it would be when space finaly is commericialised, and more spacestations and flights are run. My guess of a timescope? 75-150 years. We can do it today, bu it cost to much, just like normal flight back in the yearly 20th century. Ne technology is being developed that may change all of this. Again, I love the idea of using laser to fire off a craft, imaging a solar powered launch facility using solid-state lasers, cheap, clean and efficent.
My guess would be using small drones flying around on solar power, just pushing the trash down into the atmosphere.
Mvh:
- Knut S.
If they would just mount a frickin' laser beam on the Shuttle, this wouldn't be a problem. They should also mount lasers on the ISS. Anything that makes it more like a Death Star is tax money well spent.
Talisman
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
Not quite space invaders, but it would give a career path for alot of those video gamers out there.p.Although, gamers would tear their hair out trying to get used to the inherent latency of a spacecraft flying from orbit.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Why not use the larger pieces of space junk as target practice for the missle defense shield that Bush is after? Test the system while destroying the junk.
back in the late 90's nasa was working with the generation of aerogels to make a "space sponge" of a sorts. a huge frame holding a cube of aerogel inside to basically place in a low orbit, allow it to "sweep" for a while until it starts to gain a certain amount of damage and then de-orbit it.
I remember a huge segment on it from the show "beyond 2000" (the best tv show discovery ever had, and the morons cancelled it replacing it with a ton of animal crap)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's shocking that the space industry is so affected by simple debris. It's a wonder one of the middle eastern countries have not tried to build orbital rockets whose only purpose is to blow up when they get there. They have lots of money and their engineers are not incompetent. One properly armed missle could create a whole cascade effect. It's would totally devistate our economy and take out spy and targeting satelites all at once. There might be secret lasers or particle cannons in space that might be able to hit rockets but they could always say they are launching a satelite. Scary how vulnerable we are.
By far the biggest problem with collision in space comes from micro meteorites. The formula for the quantity of meteors of a given size is that the number of meteors is inversely proportional to the mass of the meteor. If there are 1000 1 Km asteroids in near earth orbit there would be about one million 100 meter asteroids. (Remember the mass of a sphere is proportional to the cube of its diameter.) That means that there are about a billion 10 meter rocks in near earth orbit - a trillion 1 meter rocks, 10 to the 15th 10 cm rocks, 10 to the 18th 1 cm rocks etc.
One of the problems that we humans have is over estimating our importance in the cosmic sphere - the universe hardly notices us - indeed the Earth hardly notices us; from low earth orbit it is very difficult to see anything that man has done on the Earth.
The space station - because of its size - has about 1/2 lb of drag due to the nascent atmosphere 250 miles up. This drag is why experiments in the station are referred to as "micro gravity" instead of "zero g"; there is a tiny gravitational field due to the drag. One of the reasons for the periodic shuttle trips is to reboost the space station to make up for the lost velocity from the residual drag.
I would use a modified form of that liquid styrofoam to operate in low pressure environments. Then the bot could build a "net" of the styrofoam and when it feels he mass is at a predefined point or x time has passed it would jettison it off towards the atmosphere to burn up and build a new net without requiring a reentry and re-equipment with a new net.
Where's Martha Stewart when you need her? Slap her on a shuttle and send her uip to orbit. Then you'll solve to of our problems at once.
Pax Digitalia
The most threatening of space junk is that which is not large enough to detect and manuever around, but not small enough to not worry about. This range holds lots of potentially dangerous objects that could puncture the outside of spacecraft. The problem is collecting and removing most of these objects from orbit.
On a side note, now that the ISS is higher, how is it's visibility from earth affected (if any) and will it stay at its new altitude (if so, for how long)?
Just one more note, Heaven's Above is a great resource for tracking satellites and other close to home astronomical events (such as Iridium flares).
"I don't trust goats," --To Catch a Spy
Just curious.
when the shuttle isn't there to move the ISS out of harm's way? Would the ISS have been destroyed had the shuttle not moved it? Couldn't something like this happen again, and if so, how are they going to prevent debris from damaging or destroying the ISS?
Daniel J. Kelly
Space junk caused the death of several astro-nuts, back 21 years ago... :) :) :)
evasive maneuvers?? Umm... it should be defensive maneuvers, unless it actually attacked the debris at the same time... which uh... i dont think they did...
Im sure I speak for all of us when I say that the world will feel safer after we contract people to fling Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles at coke cans just outside our atmosphere.
:-P
Apparently, NASA is working on setting up cleaning efforts, and all the space agencies have agreed not to drop garbage off in space anymore. NASA is working on making their hulls more micro-meteorite proof due to all the floating garbage. To test new hull designs, they have the four most powerful guns in the world, which shoot pea sized bullets at various types of hull designs, at 15 000 m/s. That's in the latest issue of discover.
For the most part collisions with space junk isn't quite as big a problem asd you'd think. The reason is in order to have a stable orbit at a certain altitude the object must have a certain velocity (which wold be the same for all other objects at that altidude) as a result the only time a near collision like this could happen is if the debris happens to have an intersecting orbit which is still extremely unlikely. Even in this case the debris would probably not have collided if it hadn't been moved, it was just a percautionary measure. Still does anyone know if there are plans for manouvering rockets on the completed ISS?
I stole this Sig
Actually, we could use those nifty ion drives (like on Deep Space 1) and some really good AI to push much of the larger debris back into the atmosphere.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
Well, anything that had enough surfac area/sail area would slow down fast as it is.
Otherwise you need to either hit it with something that would slow it down substantially, or else you go and scoop it up. Things like errant gloves, wrenches, Nuts, bolts, etc.
then you could take the bag and throw that towards the earth to burn up
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I remember the BBC story from last night mentioning a delay of 1 day, but my cache of the page is gone now and the current article dosen't mention that, so I have to assume that I misread the original article. Sorry about that.. it was a late night..
God became man to enable men to become sons of God. -C.S. Lewis
OK, this is America, we got nukes. so many nukes as a matter of fact that we are taking them apart and burying them, why not just put on the best 4th of July firework display ever, and, as an added bonus, vaporise a buttload of space junk? Aside from the massive EMP that would happen, would nukes really work at getting rid of some of the larger peices of junk? What about the blast pushing sattelite out of their orbits? Sounds like fun anyway....
Anyone out there remember the TV show from the 70's (around the time of Star Wars) called Quark, with (I think) Richard Benjimin. (http://www.tvparty.com/recquark.html) He flew a intergalactic garbage scow around and collected garbage. What a show....
-Bill
They should just blast it all into the sun and burn it.
They should just blast all the junk into the sun.
Of course, it might take a bit of time and money to move that many gigatonnes of rock, but then it's always harder to fix stuff than to muck it up.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I would assume that 90% of the junk in space is small metalic parts right? So why not put up a satalite a few hundred k's in front of the ISS, with a powerfull electromagnet and a very strong hull? If the magnet was strong enough, it would pull in a lot of the small parts, which would no longer be a threat. That would then just leave the larger pieces of debris, some of which could be thrown out of orbit by the magnet, and the rest would be a lot easier to dodge.
after NASA has learned its lesson on metric vs imperial units on that mars mission that got lost, i can just see it... "5km? how much is that? ...Better move it just in case."
Like the bbc article says the shuttle used it's thusters (on a series of small burns that lasted about 20 mins) to push the station and thus aviod comming within 3 miles of a I think the second or third stage of a Soviet rocket that was launched in the 70's.
On any other given day when the shuttle leaves the station they fly a lap around the station (to check it out and take photos.)
I was watching this on Nasa TV and I heard that at first (because they where using fuel on the burn to move the station) the shuttle was only going to do a 1/4 lap around the station, But after the bean counters on the ground re-did the maths they mannage to pull out a half lap around the station (if the shuttle crew loose a hour of their off duty time and sleep with the shuttle pointed towards the stars..)
There is some US agency that monitors space junk I think their name is "space command" (I think the same mob who montors missile launches) they issue warnings when something comes within a 40 mile box of the station.
Star Wars? Nah. Quark was the way to clean up space.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Wow! Doesn that mean we'll get rings, like Saturn? Great!
free the mallocs!
Do as Fry suggests and fire junk at junk