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More on Orbital Space Debris
wvanhuffel writes "This is a call for /.'s to put their thinking caps on. The US Airforce, NASA and other agencies are looking for ideas to find and eliminate threats from space debris to craft (space, in the use of).
Personally I like the idea of "robots to serve as roving garbage scowls" - my question is "How do they identify 'garbage'?" - Would the ISS qualify?" I don't know what happened to the laser broom.
Obviously this only works for grit and other small things.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
"No, bad robot, the earth is not debris."
A big freakin' magnet?
Make a satellite that's nothing more than a huge electro-magnet, launch it, turn it on, attract junk, do either a controlled descent or shoot off towards the sun (or other nearby, large orbital body.)
The opposite of progress is congress
Let devices with a steel 'fishnet' orbit the earth in predetermined lanes. Connect them to a central 'space traffic control' which keeps track of registered objects. Remove all objects that are not registered, either by laser, or by using the fishnet (and bringing it back for examination)
Why not just a Bloody Great Chunk Of Metal that just whips along absorbing everything that hits it? Or is getting something that heavy into orbit too much hassle?
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Wonder if this is entirely a cost without possibility of earning a buck or two.
If this is a cost only thing, shouldn't the countries/companies that have 'polluted' the 'area' pay for the cleaning themselves? If not I'll bet you that some distant russian company already offers this service if you are a youg popstar or you just are loaded with cash.
* good judgement comes from experience - experience comes from bad judgement *
Send Jade up there and get her to open her mouth.
Roadkill is yummy.
Is There research or prototypes of Force Fields? As such in Science Fiction? Are Force Fields possible..and if so, how/what they work? If they were feasible, would this not be able to protect against debris?
what are some of the common protections/ideas used in sci fi against interstellar/orbital debris.
I think trying to locate every nut and bolt leftover in space is not feasible...and those small items are probably the most dangerous as they are difficult, if not impossible to detect...right?
Sharks with frikkin' lasers!
(replying to myself because I hit send too quickly like the fool I am)
Massive bonus points to Nasa for naming it the Kubrick/Clarke debris sweeper, as its a blimmin' huge 1x4x9 block of black dense stuff.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Anyone ever seen 'Junkyard wars'/'Scrap heap challenge'? Just send the contestants up there and use the orbiting resources for their creations :-)
Yes it's time for slashdotters to put their thinking caps on. I'm sure our geek aura will penetrate a problem that has had the best minds of the world's space agencies stumped for decades.
I await with glee the hoards of posts suggesting enormous ballistic inflatable penguins and fleets of linux powered robotic red swingline staplers. But what about prevention in the future? Easy, just make all space objects run Windows, that way they will crash themselves into the blue ocean of death eventually.
There, I've got it out of the way early so hopefully others won't need to.
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
Just shoot it down
Nowhere in the article do they discuss plans/methods to avoid making the problem worse. Shouldn't there be an international standard, at least among the ISS participants, for getting new space junk out of the way? A French satellite collided with remains of a French Arianne booster. Wouldn't it make sense now to define a standard procedure for ensuring that junk is sent on a destructive re-entry? If they use a verifiable method of ensuring destruction, it could help in assigning responsibility. And insurance companies could use that in assigning premiums (or littering fines ;>) on satellites, etc.
When I was a young 'un, my mother used to cure the embarrassing problem of wool-bobbles on clothes by wrapping a hand in inverted adhesive tape (sticky side out) and running it bruskly over the surface of the affected garment. These days, the rise of the mighty Remmington Fuzzaway (tm) has largely rendered this practise useless.
I believe however, in consultation with my mother, that this might still be applied to the above problem. I propose a giant space hand, sheathed in cellotape and waved liberally about in orbit would be the best method.
http://www.davetansley.com - you proba
an electromagnetic shield (aka big magnet) should do the job, it will simply deflect all the incomming particles...
Sig you!
There is bound to be some sort of RF admission or electrical noise that these LEO emit. Therefore, it would be possible to detect debris from which that is not. A garbage robot can sweep the area with sonar to detect leftover boosters; bolts, foot clamps or whatever else is up there. When the garbage holding area is full, the robot will destroy itself by falling into the ocean where the rightful owners can pick it up
There is no
There's only one potential problem I can imagine with this scenario. We'd need to figure out how to teach the nanobots the difference between functional satellites and nonfunctional trash. It wouldn't be good at all if we suddenly found that our nanobots had accidentally disassembled all our low-orbit satellites.
Now that I think about it, though, it occurs to me that nanobots would most likely be very susceptible to solar radiation, which they wouldn't be protected from outside Earth's atmosphere. I wonder how hard it would be to construct radiation-shielded nanobots?
Oh dear God, that'd be the BEST! Imagine being able to hack a garbage collection satellite, and knock random satellites out of orbit.
Some people consider defacing Yahoo as having enough people see. Imagine having a flickering bright light fall over the city of your choice.
Damn I... uhhm, I can't wait to get my friend... ummm, yeah, my friend more information on how to hack... Ummm, yeah.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Everything for which there is no record of the object's orbit is garbage. I wonder how many military satellites that strategy would take out?
I doubt, therefore I may be.
IIRC there are about 200 000 objects ranging from milimeter size pieces to fat chunks of metal in orbit around our planet. Someday one is going to take out a spacecraft or satellite or damage one seriously. Obviously, it is going to be a lot of work to get rid of these pieces of scrap. So my carefully thought out proposition ;)...
1.Catalogue them -- A database with all known objects and their orbits is the obvious first step
2.Build a sateliite with a relatively low power laser, charged by solar panels. An alternative would be a simple kind of large, thick metal "shield" that would simply get in the way of the space debris.
3.Place a ion engine on the craft.
4.Write software that would automatically select the nearest target from the db and move the satelite into position to evaporate or impact with the debris.
5.Very importantly, have an operator or command center that would be required by the software to OK each impact so that the satelite doesn't get misused or highjacked.
6.If using the satelite with a big metal "target shield", eventually the shield will become useless. It can be pushed into reentry by the ion engine and can then burn up on reentry, the ion engine then climbs back into normal orbit and is fitted out with a new shield by a drone rocket.
7.It will take many years but will start to show progress over time. Good that it will give the operators in the command center work and enable them to read books, playgames etc inbetween hits.
Take a sheet of metal, thick enough to withstand an impact from most pieces it will run into. On either side of the metal sheet, attach a few layers of mattresses or something similar. The metal would shoot through the mattress, hit the metal plate, lose most of its energy, and the pieces would generally get caught in the ricochet (if not the initial entry).
Send a bunch of these up and send them to the predicted "hot spots." Over a period of a few years, they could absorb quite a bit of material. Being low-tech, they're cheap to make. Costly to get into orbit because of the weight, but seems like it could be affordable enough.
The only way this would work would be if they could identify every satellite in orbit around the planet, which would be hard even if every satellite was American. Once you start thinking about the Russian, Chinese, European ones etc. it becomes more complicated, especially if you consider that probably some goverments won't want to tell the US what satelittes they have, and what they do. I bet that not all of the old Russian 'junk' up there is as useless as its supposed to be.
Just fly up and use a tractor beam to tow it into the Sun. Duh.
First off, any kind of collector device deployed in space is totally impractical. For one thing, the mass of the device could easily end up being equivalent or even greater than any debris collected. That is, you'd need as much or more propellant and material to grab the micrometeorites and garbage in the collection robot as the mass of the stuff being collected. This means you'd have to spend as much money on boosters as we spent putting junk in orbit over the past 40 years. That's a lot of money...
Why launch anything into orbit at all? A far better solution would be to build a powerful enough ground based laser system to convert the garbage into vapor. It would be cheaper, as you would not have to spend vast sums of money trying to minimize failures (if the laser on the ground breaks, you get out tools and fix it. If the orbital robot breaks you just blew a lot of money). To detect the rapidly moving orbital debris you would need an extremely high resolution radar...at least one of the X band things being build in Alaska.
The laser would be an array of linear accelerators in parallel (or cyclotrons) that would accelerate electrons that would release the energy in the beam. (A free electron laser) Such lasers are inherently very efficient, and the system would only use electric power that could be obtained off an ordinary power grid (a LOT of electric power...you'd need some sort of temporary storage perhaps giant rotating drums or something)
And the best part? A multi-megawatt laser array, capable of hitting extremely small fast moving targets with enough power to vaporize them...
Certainly the Pentagon could think of a use for one of those.
Say, missile defense?
Such a system would be FAR more reliable than a rocket booster interceptor that has THOUSANDS of possible points of failure. If the wrong part fails, the booster fails. With a parallel array of lasers if one fails its no big deal. In addition, given enough power it would be able to vaporize all the incoming targets, decoys and bits of insulation and all.
Wouldn't it make sense now to define a standard procedure for ensuring that junk is sent on a destructive re-entry?
How about writing legislation that says people can't litter. That'll keep the Earth clean. And maybe fine people for littering - that'll be a good incentive.
What do you mean that we already have that??
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Moving asteroids isn't that hard, although care is needed to ensure you don't reenter it. An asteroid big enough to make this work would be big enough to wipe out all life on earth- so be careful out there guys. ;-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!""Spaceball 1 has now become ... Mega Maid!"
Why not just put up a sign that says "No littering"?
All those I've seen on Earth are surrounded by empty drink cans, cigarette packs, discarded condoms, etc. Maybe the effect also works in space.
After I thought about this carefully I've come the conclusion that Lasers are cool and we should use them in space for any purpose we can find for them even if the application is less than ideal. Now I have a good reason for this. When ever NASA uses a big freak'n laser its bound to be front page news. If NASA can get the public ooh'ing over the neat stuff maybe they can get the funding to do some really cool stuff. Yes, I'm kidding.
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
Just curious as I am under the impression that not all of the debris is composed of ferrous material that could be affected by a large magnet. Some of the debris is little more then chips of paint that fell off of satellites, shuttles and other space craft.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
1. Attach an extra module to the ISS.
2. Put a huge-ass electromagnet in it.
3. Use magnet to attract debris like old satellites, empty booster fuel tanks, Russian spacecraft and GPS satellites.
4. Strap a booster to the ISS.
5. Use booster to de-orbit ISS.
6. Watch it re-enter and burn up.
7. Cheer.
No need for research. All we need is a pair of clones, a plant man, and transmute named Gene/Jean.
See the IMDB for the details
All the answers so far seem to involve some sort of capture mechanism to absorb the debris which limits the lifetime of the capturing device (unless we orbit a mini-blackhole?). Would it be more efficient to deflect the debris out of orbit, either into space and away, or into the atmosphere so it burnt up safely? Perhaps by attaching a ginat space plow to the shuttle and gettingt eh guys to cruise around for a while?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Hmmm .. so we send up a zillion nanobots who recycle all the debris into more nanobots .. end result is that we end up with a (zillion * mass of one nanobot) more stuff in orbit threatening the innocent space based weapons that are just minding their own business. This is worse than just leaving the garbage all alone.
You need to *remove* the garbage from orbit, not just transform it from one sort of item to another.
Now if they could all assemble together into one big nanobot ball as the process progresses, then that would be another thing. But if they are delicate little beasties, then I can't see that happening.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I think there is only one man for the job.
Roger Wilco!
Doesn't mean that they are the best minds in the world. For example, there is a small organization called Mensa that has members from all walks of life. People that work professionally as doctors, computer programmers, GARBAGE MEN, TRUCK DRIVERS, Waiters and waitresses, not to mention janitors and a variety of other professions.
I can only imagine that you have run into people through your life that have a job or position that should belong to someone that appears to have more inteligence than a wart covered toad. However, even people with marginal inteligence are able to get jobs well above where they "should" be.
Plus, this is sort of the "Many-Eyes" concept that is commonly used in Open-Source Software, which has so far created a very stable, scalable Operating System, several beautiful and functional desktop environments and a variety of other software.
-.-
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I think NASA should hire Roger Wilco to clean up the mess. He has excellent CV for this kind of stuff..
yush
Lets float all the RIAA execs in the path of the orbital debris, that should help stop it.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Carbon nanotubes have become a hot item of discussion across all fields of engineering because, in part, the cylinders constructed from hexagonal links of carbon atoms are believed to be perhaps the strongest manmade material.
That should be "strongest material fullstop". The inference to natural materials can only be referring to spider silk. Spider dragline silk has a tensile strength comparable to steel, but will stretch 35% without breaking. It seems steel can achieve up to about 5 Gpa in tensile strength depending on quality, etc. Carbon nanotube fibres are expected to be in the hundreds of Gpa.
There is a cautious belief amongst materials scientists that carbon nanotubes may in fact be the strongest substance possible in terms of tensile strength.
A great overview of nanotubes as a construction material can be found in Bradley Edward's Space Elevator manuscript. See also the slashdot discussion about it.
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
Not all orbits around Earth need to be checked. Most orbits are low enough, and they degrade over time, and thus there's not a big issue for garbage collection.
However, in geosyncronous orbits, there's another problem. We've been using these orbits ever since we started sending satellites up there, and this part of space is filled with little rivits, rocket boosters, etc. The good news is, that even though they are in orbit, they are moving at pretty much the same speed as everything near them (we're mainly looking at the Geo-syncronous orbits here, therefore everybody stays above their little piece of the equator.
Now, here's my way-stupid idea:
Send up a big steel ball. Now, have it plow through the geo sycronous orbits and knock everything it can out of it's way. All active satellites would have to move out of the orbit breifly, and then once the "Mr. Space Plow" passed, they could resume their orbits. If they can't respond... Well, that's just too damn bad.
Once out of the nice geosyncronous orbits, the trash does one of two things: degrade and crash to Earth, or escapes. Either was, problem solved.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
When a robot encounters something, it will first have to verify whether it has a "space-signature-signal" (or some other catchy name).
If the object it encounters keeps radio silence (no signature? it's presumably something dead) the robot would have to send a message of it's own to the craft ("Anybody in there?").
The object receiving this message should reply to this, if it doesn't it's getting much more closer to being classified as "junk".
Now if the object would fail the second (redundant) test, the Robot is to send visual feedback to earth of the object ("look guys, this thing seems dead enough allright!").
Here it should be analyzed by 2 or more different agencies, in different countries (I say Russia, USA, China, France) this would help avoid all political hassle.
Then if the majority (or all) of the agencies give permission, the junk could dropped back in destructive orbit or shot to smithereens with a supercool megalaser!
You might want to bring up the dangers of doing this:
This is definitly not a foolproof system, but it's as close as you get imo: the robot does a triple check (first check for the signal from the craft, if it's not there request a signal, if it's not there ask permission from independent earth agencies by sending visual feedback) and it could be equipped with a remote shutdown system, so that IF it goes crazy somehow, we could zap it from earth (to be cleaned up by a colleague)
well... my 2 cents :)
"The majority is always sane, Louis." -- Nessus
http://slashdot.jp
Why has no-one proposed this obvious solution? Recycle the materials that we have launched into space. The other proposed solutions aren't environmentally friendly. We've already sullied our planet. There's no need to likewise sully interplanetary space with our detritus.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
It helps keep deer from running in front of your car (http://www.xp3hornet.com/faq.shtml) maybe it'd keep trash away from the front of your space craft?
Hey, there shouldn't be any trash/dirt floating out there anyway, I mean...
SPACE IS A VACUUM!!! Right?!?!
First, clear out a sector of orbital space on a given date and time. Anything that can't clear itself out is too weak to survive and will be considered space junk.
Second, send up a large thermonuclear device to that sector.
Third, detonate said device, incinerating all space junk or sending it out of orbit or sending it into the atmosphere.
It will make star gazing a little more interesting.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
I'm sure I read this idea in some Sci-Fi novel, either from Arthur C Clarke or Issac Asimov... But...
Have a viscous gel which is stable in a vacuumb (or near vacuumb) and contain it in some sac - probably made of synthetic silk. this sac is maintained in position by a collection of redundant independent thrusters attached to several point of the sac.
Debris would penetrate the sac and be immobolised in the gel. This sac and its contents can be disposed of (fire it to the moon?) oand a new sac attached to the thrusters.
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
Let's turn that space debris to raw materials. Clean up LEO, cut down the amount of stuff that needs to be hauled up the gravity well, and make money doing it.
Build a system of robots that finds debris, cuts it up, hauls it to a refuse station, and reduces it to a reusable form.
You use three types of robots.
Many small mobile bots (solar powered and ion-engine driven) find space debris and boost it to collecting spots.
The second type chops up debris and boosts it to stable higher orbits. More of the second type intersect at the higher orbit and bring debris to the third type, which
vaporizes the debris (no big deal in space with unlimited solar power and no atmosphere), charges the vapor, and shoots the charged vapor down a long tube with a magnetic system designed to act like a big mass spectrometer, separating the vapor by composition and leaving hunks of iron, silicon, etc.
Or use a low tech but more high maintenance design and spin the stuff to separate it. Either way you've got raw materials enough to say, triple the speed they're building the ISS with even the junk materials usable for shielding.
Seems to me that this system could be built by graduate students from a school like Carnegie-Mellon for five or six million dollars, tops.
Notes:If you think that solar power is too wimpy consider that with two or three hundred collectors in orbit it's no big deal if it takes a given collector six months to bring in a load. Also, the collectors can be programmed to keep a bit of debris and coat themselves in it, protecting them from radiation and prolonging their own useful life. Give the collectors swappable boards and perhaps a two year board replacement cycle and they should last for at least a decade each.
As for how to get them up there armadillo aerospace and the like are more than capable of boosting plenty of small payloads to low earth orbit in the near future. Chances are the toughest issue would be the legal fooforah of who owns the abandoned gear. Guaranteed that as soon as people figure out that their dead telsat has market value LLoyds will be fighting the salvage declaration.
So, if anybody wants to do this, look me up.
Rustin H. Wright
Information Geek, former inventor, founder and publisher, Reed&Wright
pubgeek@netscape.net
We only need to use the United Galaxy Sanitation Patrol ship to pick up the debris.
Is the desire for a cleanup related to this Wall Street journal article (registration required) where scientists are warning that a missle defense program, and a resulting space-war, could fill earth's orbit with debris, making space research/travel impossible? Is the concern here, that we be able to cleanup space after a war, and not clean it up now?
OK. So in a couple of years instead of aluminium we will have unburnable, unbreakable, uneverything debris up there. And then these would survive even reentry and hit the surface overheated at a couple of thousand km/h...
"Ceramic flying saucer leaves burn marks on vegetable field. Farmer sells Space-Fried Vegetables at discounted prices."
Score:1, Unread
Strictly speaking, it should all be recovered and brought back to earth, to keep the mass of stuff of earth constant.
Most of that debris came from copyrighted technologies, yet pretty much anyone could go up and use the debris. Clearly, this is a violation of the RIAA's and MPAA's rights. Let's just get them to sue the debris into submission. Hell, this is practically a P2P sharing system (one person buys the technologies, everyone has access to it without extra cost).
Let's have the DMCA do some good for a change!
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Tell it to the supernovae.
4.Write software that would automatically select the nearest target from the db and move the satelite into position to evaporate or impact with the debris.
Sounds a lot to me like the algorithms required would have a lot in common with some well-known CS research problems, like the moving of the head of a hard disk. I'm sure some existing knowledge could be applied, but the space junk problem could also be a source of new research money...
Christopher
Mozilla
NASA and other agencies are already tracking all the junk. The problem isn't tracking and ID'ing the junk. The problem is getting it.
Dirk
This discussion has come up before.
And before you get modded up further, small pieces of grit are capable of creating holes in the the space shuttle's windshield.
And a side order of inverse tachyon pulses?
---
Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
It would be easier to come up with potential solutions if some of the statistical information that the US Space Command has on debris orbits were available. On the other hand, I would imagine that the researchers who are being paid to work on this problem have full access to that information.
Christopher
Mozilla
By launching spheres packed full of ball bearings and explosives we could surly hope to....
wait, we did this already
nevermind
"We deal in lead" - Roland of Gilead
Shortwave radar tracks ever bit of dust larger than a given size and transmits it back to a central database on earth. Eventually the database will contain useful information for all popular orbits.
database could then be integrated into an autoavoidance system.
Wouldn't it than be smarter to accumulate all the space junk in a big orbital junkyard?
This could also include all the obsolete satelites currently burned down in the atmosphere.
Next to this junkyard there could be an orbital factory using the scrap metal and other debris for raw materials.
Furthermore, this facility wouldn't be *THAT* expensive to build, and i.e. the accumulation of all the used satelites in the same place would be trivial, by programming their final thrust to get them to the place. The compound in question could use solar energy, and be fully automatic.
Building the trivial things, like the replacement solar panels for the ISS as well as other relatively easy to produce things in space would seem like a wiser way to deal with stuff that cost millions to launch up there!
I can already see them shooting the space debris into tinier and tinier smithereens ;-)
Maybe every now and then a UFO will arrive to take pot shots at the Space Debris Cleaning System (tm)
Put a big snowplow on the front of a bunch of those suckas and just clear the path. You don't have to destroy the debris - you just have to move it the hell out the way.
... ever seen spaceballs - the movie? That spaceship/maid has to be useful in this case..
If the "axis of evil" finds out about this there'll be hell to pay!
...consoles.
Let's launch a bunch of satellites into orbit with lasers or some kinetic energy weapon and wire them into video game consoles back on the ground here. Kids can drop $.50 for a chance to blast away at space debris. That way we can use those well-honed reflexes of the future space cadets (take that how you want to) and maybe even raise some money for NASA with the fees.
(You can implement a targeting/size filter to keep from shooting at real satelites.)
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Make an unmanned, remote controlled space craft that shoots some sort of projectiles. Virtualize the control by computer display and joystick.
You could literally make this into a new high-tech never-before-heard-of military game where you just fly around and shoot bits of debris to break it up into smaller bits of debris until it's gone.
Scow is a boat Scowl is a facial expression
I say we divert solar wind to run across earth like a giant balloon. Then, once we've crippled most of the worlds satellites in one fell swoop (localized aurora borealis style), the resultant static attraction will cause all the pesky garbage to hurtle into the atmosphere and provide a wonderfull lightshow.
So a few widely used sats come down too? When you make an omelette...
Remeber the giant space vaccum from Space Balls? We could build a similar device, but use it to suck up the debris, instead of sucking out the atmosphere of a planet. Since space is already a vaccum, it would require no power.
It seems the best way to start is by collecting the debris into repositories. I would suggest using some sort of netting that can be spanned between collector satellites (four - one on each corner) and moved in sync to sweep paths along hotspots clean. Then bring the corners together and draw a perimeter string closed for packaging.
What NASA needs to do from that point depends on what they want with the junk. Just launching it out of orbit or toward the moon won't make the problem go away. Maybe there is a way to incinerate the collected garbage while in orbit. Just as long as flaming debris doesn't come back our way.
A far better solution would be to build a powerful enough ground based laser system to convert the garbage into vapor.
How can you possibly believe that?
First, a laser on the ground would have to have a crapload of power since the vast majority of it would be dissipated by the atmosphere.
Next you have to refine the optics to an extremely high degree so that the beam is still focused at the target. Even the slightest bit of divergence really adds up over hundreds of kilometers. To vaporize high tensile strength steel requires a lot of energy, and most of these objects are very small -- both are reasons for needing a focused beam.
Also consider that they are traveling at tens of thousands of MPH. It would be almost impossible to servo track the object, so your laser would have to work with a single high-energy pulse. You'll need a very high peak pulse power to deliver enough energy to do any serious damage. And this ignores the fact that we can't actually track the majority of the debris. The ground based laser thing would need extremely precise tracking information which is just not available for anything but the large stuff -- which we can already do a fine job of working around. Also consider the aiming accuracy necessary to precisely hit a small target a few centimeters or smaller from hundreds or thousands of kilometers away. Then there's the issue of all the crap in the way between your laser and the target which could cause diffraction, scattering, dissipation, etc.
In the 80s the Star Wars thing was going to cost how many billions (75?) to disable (not totally vaporize as you propose) much larger objects traveling at more certain orbits, and was called a technical impossibility by many engineers who read the proposal. And even this plan would have used space-based lasers so the distances and dissipation factors was not as bad.
What you are proposing would never work. Get real.
No, but I think that M$'s IIS would! As junk or Trash that is.
NASA is already using AeroGel in the StarDust mission to collect high-velocity particles.
Thick enough, it could be used to capture those tiny bolts and fragments they can't track by radar.
Also, one of their concerns about using lasers to zap bigger debris was the fear of generation bazillion smaller particles that couldn't be collected or tracked thereafter.
Why not create an autonomous robot that circles the globe, zap the objects it can while collecting the smaller debris in an AeroGel fish net?
Think it won't hold up to the task? Check out the photos of AeroGel. The fluffy thing can hold up a brick!
While at it maybe someone can design a laser beach comber to clean up the beaches along the East coast.
You are not what you own.
1. Laser from the other day http://slashdot.org/articles/02/07/10/219254.shtml ?tid=126
2. In the seventies was a moview about a bunch of garbage folks who decide to build a space ship to go up to the moon and clean up the mess left behind for salvage. I think you should just put a bounty on the stuff, and let commerce do the rest.
If I recall, a few days ago there was a story about how a Japanese researcher and others were powering paper airplanes from the ground with lasers. I think they were heating a propellent which wouldn't work for space debris. But For the broom, does one really have to destroy the object? Or cann't you just slow it's orbit enough to cause it to fall back to earth and burn up or fall on the head of some unfortuante victim?
When you think that NASA spent countless $$$ to come up with a pen that would work in space (in a zero grav environment) to come up with a very expensive system (involving ink being put under pression) where each pen would cost over $10,000.
When the obvious solution (used by the Russians) was to use a pencil...
I think that having this kind of question opened to anybody can only help...
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
It would be fun to blast the junk from earth using lasers or ion beams, but there are lots of problems with this. Ion beams 'hosepipe' in the atmosphere, and the laser beams reflect off shiny metal. If you could get even little bits of stuff out of orbit, then the military would be seriously interested.
It would be nice to have some passive thing like a big sticky web, but space is so mind-bogglingly big, that anything big enough to stand a reasonable chance of catching anything would have to be so huge that it would take a lot of rockets to lift it, which gets us back to point one. It seems you need something active that can 'see' the debris and go to meet it.
The only thing left seems to be to use a satellite that has a very long life in space, and so can offset the risk of adding to the junk with its launch. Suppose you had a big solar furnace in space. Anything at the focus would evaporate. The stream of evaporating material could be used to provide thrust to change the orbit. It cold use this thrust to intercept the next bit of rubbish, which it would then burn to catch up with the one after that. The art would be to keep the mass of the satellite very low, so it could get a lot of navigation out of a little bit of consumed mass.
It wont go off and start lunching on the ISS, but, hey, you can't have everything...
Turn up the gravity a few notches, and within a few hours, all of the current space debris will fall and be vaporized in the atmosphere.
Not only would it effectively clean out the space around the planet, it would also make a very pretty lightshow, incomparable with anything that has ever been witnessed before, and it would increase the pressure of the atmosphere, causing increased health benefits.
Note: watch for falling satellites.
Karma: \Kar"ma\, n. [Skr.] (Buddhism) One's acts considered as fixing one's lot in the future existence.
Energy consumption can be dealt with in terms of nuclear propulsion. We've done it before in space - not sure the ramifications of using it in near-earth orbit, though.
I know that a large quantity of what's up there has solar power - I'm not versed well enough to know if we can easily convert solar power into movement (I imagine we can, though). If solar could be used it would cut huge amounts of money off the project. Of course, it the Debris Collection Satellite might have to sit and charge for a while to be prepared to chase debris.
Right now we track much of our orbital debris with radar, but we lose decent resolution around 10 cm. Tracking from a satellite could be much better, as we don't have to account for weather and variables, like birds (hopefully ;). This would allow us to determine what's up there.
The hard part is getting everyone to tell whoever is doing the cleanup what needs to stay up there. Multiple countries, companies, all would have to either provide the location of their equipment to not have it damaged/destroyed, or make a massive effort to have it all change orbit so we could clear an orbit at a time.
I like the theorum of throwing things back into the atmosphere, but I think it would be better to collect it, say, at the ISS, and attempt some sort of salvage. There is millions of dollars in technology floating around up there unused, so why not save on launch costs if some of it can be reclaimed?
Of course, collecting technology with the untent to re-use it would be even more expensive...
--
Curiouser and Curiouser...
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
How about Nerf? But it might not be so "squishy" in a vacuum, particularly if the soft foam has volatiles which evaporate. But you just want to slow down an impacting object - if it embeds itself that's fine, but merely slowing it will also help the junk fall from orbit sooner.
A disc might not be the right design. Just a balloon full of honey or syrup. "This Orbit Clearance Service Uses And Paid For By Jello"
Actually, you'd need to use a material which is not too volatile. When exposed to vacuum the material should not boil away nor have the surface harden so it can not be penetrated easily enough. Not that an object hitting at orbital speeds will be easy to stop from penetrating...
There is an awful lot of empty space up there, so the odds of hitting anything is small. But if there is indeed a 1% chance of a satellite being destroyed in a year, there must be an awful lot of junk. A Space Shuttle can carry up a 15-foot by 90-foot cargo, which could create a rather large absorbent blob. Especially if you use balloons full of foam and create the foam from much smaller liquids, so the 15x90 volume gets multiplied to a much larger volume.
We'll do the jobs no one else will do! Give us an old Space Shuttle, some suits and jetpacks, and some extra-large Hefty garbage bags. We'll take care of that for ya!
Another idea: have organizations "Adopt-an-Orbit" and keep our skyways clean. Unfortunately all the brag signs they put up will cause the same problem....
Why is NASA so scared about rocks hitting their spacecraft? All they need to do is sit in the middle and shoot the biggest pieces, then shoot the small fragments one at a time. Never shoot another big one until you've cleaned up all the tiny pieces, and you'll be fine.
Ever see an old steam engine? Notice that big angular piece of metal just above the track in front? It's called a cowcatcher. The premise is, whatever is in your way (be it a cow or some girl tied to the tracks) will either be pushed to one side or split to either side. Depending on how tough your metal is, it'll deflect a lot of lesser junk too. That's the way to deal with it. Even the Enterprise had a deflector shield; you can't avoid or clean up every little piece of material in space.
And finally: who says all that junk isn't worth something? It's just a treasure waiting to be discovered! Put Martha Stewart in a spacesuit and provdide her with gold rickrack and glitter glue, and we'll be able to provide even the poorest third-world peasant with a stunning centerpiece on their dining room table.
...
You can always trust Rober Forward to come up with a good idea.
See his Terminator Tether page. It's a great way to bring down an orbiting mass without actually having to carry the mass of fuel that would be required for a deorbiting burn.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Boy, what world do you live in? I'm not sure that a nasty look from a robot will do much to solve the space debris problem. Perhaps a robot with a garbage pick, plastic bag, and orange vest would be a better place to start...
I recall something about tiny particles that could be used to identify everything. One suggestion was to meld them into explosives, to track the origin. Going forward, this could be a good application. If all space objects were "coded" future debris could be traced to the source. Penalties could either be finanicial, or better yet, offenders could be required to allocate time to cleaning up existing "non-coded" debris. Maybe an international coalition would be the enforcers.
The Spring 2002 issue of Artemis Magazine had an excellent article on this by Henry P. Cate, Jr., titled the "Junk Man's Ladder". The idea is to put up a tether (many kilometers long "rope") in a convenient orbit with electrodynamic lift capabilities and some thrust, move it around to "catch" space debris, and move the junk up to the center of mass of the tether, to give it greater stability. Tethers like this are form of "space elevator", able to lift move things from low to high orbit with high efficiency. More on orbital tethers can be found at Tethers Unlimited Inc., run by Robert L. Forward and Robert P. Hoyt (who I was fortunate to have dinner with a couple of months ago).
Energy: time to change the picture.
Here's NASA's orbital debris site. Check out Mitigate for their safety standard. One point to remember is that NASA isn't a regulatory agency, and so can only police itself.
As with any debris, pollution prevention is the best way to clean up the problem.
Due to the cyclic expansion of the earths atmosphere caused by changing seasons, solar flares and meny otherthings, all debris in low earth orbit will in the medium term be removed itself. This is because, as the atmosphere expands it exerts more friction on the debris causing it to slow down and heat up, causing it to re-enter the atmosphere and be burnt up. This will automaticaly happen over a time frame of 10 -> 20 years.
Therefore to solve the problem of space debris all that needs to be done is make sure any material that is taken into space by humans is returned to earth.
As for non-human debris and debris already in high earth orbit, due to the volume of space involved this would be impossible to remove, although most satalites etc are for the present and near future are interested mainly in low earth orbit.
Get some sort of mesh "net" made out of whatever metal is deemed strong enough and have these nets surround whatever it is you don't want to get damaged. I know it sounds really low tech and bulky, but hell it's cheap and would probably work.
~ now you know
You set up something like they used in the movie Shrek. The Princess took two sticks and wrapped spider web between them and waved it back and forth to catch flies for Shrek to eat. We just set up two massive paralell columns with a giant net, resulting in a square mile of "capture zone". Of course I have no idea what the net will be made of, physical composit material, maybe an energy field running through the poles. Once it's figured out the best design, send up a couple hundred? units and start catching the flies.
Why don't you just hop in a spaceship and go look you lazy skinflint bas'ards.
My suggestion is create a large group of little robots with bags (this would make them light and easy to put in orbit - a shuttle's cargo bay full of them could make wonders). They may have arms to grab things, or just catch the debris with the bag (like a butterfly collector). With the bag full they would return to a manned depot (ISS?), empty it and go back to work. The debris could be recycled by humans in a junkyard manner.
The bags could have a simple mechanical one-way opening, to avoid inertia to make things scape. The main criteria of (automatic?) selection would be the size, since most of the junk in orbit is small, and the main problem is this - big things are more likely to be avoided by spaceships.
Alex.
If you can read this, thank an english teacher.
I'm sure there's a really good reason not to, but can't you just stick a big magnet on the space shuttle or something and at the very least suck all the trash into one spot? Then I suppose you could put it all in a cosmic hefty bag and shoot it into the sun or something.
First and foremost, any solution needs to consider the economic factor. A solution that pays for itself will be a hands down winner.
Second, it seems like many of the solutions here would create more debris than already exists. A single large satellite is far simpler to track and avoid than a few thousand pieces of that large satellite. Unless your lasers or other weapons completely convert the debris into energy, you're wasting your time. Even if they force the debris toward Earth, the question would remain of "how did they do it"? The answer is by vaporizing matter which blasted away in the opposite direction. That matter is now not only debris in space, but untrackable debris. Even a paint fleck can do (and has done) serious damage to another orbiting object.
Third, THIS SPACE JUNK HAS VALUE!!! If its matter, and its in orbit, it is worth thousands of dollars a pound. It blows my mind everytime they guide something down that took millions too get up there instead of coming up with a way to get stuff into a parking orbit. Eventually, probably even today, there should be enough materials in space to justify manufacturing in space instead of sending more stuff up.
Steps we should take to turn this lead into gold include a) all future items launched should have provisions to reach an orbiting factory/storage facility at the end of their expected life. b) they need to all have provisions for capture via forces instead of mechanical means. This might mean adding magnetic materials or something. This way, an orbiting vehicle could capture them without contact that could cause further scattering of debris. c) software needs to be developed that can calculate capture plans for multiple objects that utilize the energy (stored in the momentum) of the objects captured effectively to help reach the next object and eventually get back to the orbiting factory/storage facility. Sort of like a game of 3D billiards. d) automated recycling and manufacturing technologies need to be developed to turn these raw materials into useful things like airtight habitat shells. At least initially, we'd probably have to keep bringing the high tech chips and stuff up the hard way, but the heavy shells and stuff could likely be very effectively manufactured in space. Things like girders for the space station should be relatively easy to do.
A large net orbiting a spacecraft (that is in turn orbiting the earth) can catch debris that comes across the space craft. The idea is that the net would have several radial fins, with magnets every few meters. The whole mess would be held out by centrifugal force. Anything that comes in contact with it, will (if it's moving fast) cause the fin it contacts to colapse around it, and will impart it's energy to the links in the net. Once the object is slowed down enough, if it's metal it will just drift over to a magnet. Everyonce in a while the net is replaced, and the old one, can be sent down to the atmosphere to burn up.
Does anyone remember this quirky space sitcom from the 70's, starring Richard Benjamin as the commander of a space garbage skow?
- Mike
the Space Cowboys already got rid of the russian IKON nuclear enabled satellite.
How about some sort of engine sattelite that would clamp on to the debris and run it out of orbit into space? The sattelite would just need to start it on it's way an let inertia do the rest.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
I really don't think dirty looks are going to keep them from leaving their junk in space
Why do it by your self ?
We should look toward the solution, which is already tried, and tested.
Common people! The solution is obvious:
Go on. Ask for help Superman.
BBCnews reported some time ago on such a posible role for Surrey Satellite Technology's nanosatellite SNAP program. A swarm of cheap (at about 100,000 UK sterling) manuverable tiny satellites that can latch onto and gradually deorbit junk.
How though could such carry enough reaction mass to actually slow something down enough? Info on its propulsion system is here (pdf). Could you just do it via its flywheel? Or use such to cluster together junk for collection by something bigger?I could certainly see a role as a beacon to actively tag stuff (on the net even!)rather than relying upon constant ground based monitoring.
troodon.net
Death Star.
I will freely admit that (probably) neither of these images/ideas are practical.
;-)
The first thing that came to mind was this image of the shuttle towing the biggest horseshoe magnet imaginable through the orbital plane. Besides all the bits of space junk, it had also attracted (and grabbed) a conical spacecraft as seen in the old Gerry & Sylvia Anderson series "UFO" (does anyone besides me still remember that?)
The next thing that came to mind was a whole bunch of spacewalking astronauts, all armed with enormous titanium-mesh butterfly nets and maneuvering jet backpacks.
I think I'd better go take my meds...
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
- into decaying orbits or
- a designated "trash ring" or
- push it to escape velocity
depending on specifics of each piece of junkFunny as it sounds, this could work. A proactive strategy would be based on using single hits over multiple targeting windows to push each piece of junk into decaying orbits or to shepherd junk into a trash ring where our grandkids could mine it (what will be the multiplier for the value of a chunk of scrap metal that is already at orbital velocity?). Beebees that miss would add an insignificant amount of water vapor to the upper atmosphere or leave near Earth space. Each shot would cost no more than the cost of the beebee-- the power is free. Someone could figure out the ratio of the size of the solar array to the number of shots that can be fired in month's time. My wag is that with collectors comparable with today's, the thing could manage a few shots a week.
A program like this would need a good name. I suggest "Space Balls"
...go backwards and SLIGHTLY slower than the flow so it'll run into the umbrellas at a slight slower speed. As it continues to decelerate it'll eventually lose enough speed to lose orbit & will burn up on re-entry. :)
- "When I say dance, you'd best DANCE motherf*cker!" -Violent Femmes
What is acceptible? What is not acceptible?
Is all the junk going the same general direction?
If it is, then one option would be just to make a web/mesh/fabric that sits a few hundred meters away, on the upstream side, of the object you want to protect. If everything's coming mostly the same way, the web acts as a wall, temporarily and cheaply shielding the protected object from harm.
It could be radar and visible-light transparent as well. And it could be pulled in when it's not needed anymore.
I know where you can get a bunch of surplus capacitors.
get a giant electromagnet to attract all the ferrous materials or attach giant tethers to large pieces of debris. The tethers will slow down the orbit of the debris hence less waiting time for the debris to burn up in the atmosphere.
Can not anyone remember one of the most innovative shows of the 70's? The one that addicted at least myself to science fiction?
Quark
The article is a bit heavy on the space-junk media hype. The practical answer is to let nature take its course and work toward prevention.
Any method of attempting to destroy debris isn't going to be practical. Giant debris collectors deliberately placed in dangerous orbits are likely to simply be smashed to pieces rather than gather any meaningful quantity of debris. Laser systems could vaporize metal fragments, but this vapor will simply congeal into globlets and cool into the space equivalent of bird shot. Until we develop gravity disruption fields, there is no effective way to affect the orbits of debris. The best bet is to wait the problem out. LEO is unstable. The Earth's atmosphere bulges significantly during solar maximums, and this drag has the effect of cleaning out the spacelanes within a reasonable period of time. In time, the problem (at least at LEO) will take care of itself if we can stop adding to it.
I'm pretty sure the following is being done, but there should be restrictions on any mass accelerated to orbital speeds. Specifically:
Or, we could just use the Q solution. Simply change the gravitational constant of the universe.
OK, you collect up all this stuff in orbit, but why destroy it? Doesn't it cost squillions to put things in orbit? Couldn't it be collected and used (spare nuts and bolts - melt the stuff down, whatever).
It seems kinda dumb to shoot the stuff into orbit, then send it back down again.
"my question is 'How do they identify 'garbage'?'"
When it comes across an object within certain size constraints, it calculates it's orbital data and sends it down to NORAD, which matches the data up with their database of known space debris. If there's a match, the robot picks it up.
I once read a SciFi story that dealt with this problem by creating large styrofoam balls that were set into a degrading orbit. As they passed through the junk belts they impacted. Large pieces punch through but loose energy and degrade in orbit. Small pieces are incorporated and disentegrate when the ball deorbits. The auther had it built as a device that contained the Reactant and the oxidizer so that the entire ball was created in orbit.
If the junk is only up there for a few years it makes more sense to spend time and energy on reducing the amount of junk being introduced into orbit. In a relatively short time, gravity and drag will clear the orbits for us.
When you consider the time it takes to approve, test and build a major project, a sensible Clean-Launch (tm) program and good old Nature would have fixed the worst of the problem at a much lower cost.
Naturally this is less of a solution further up where orbital lifetimes go into the hundreds if not thousands of years.
But some things to think about should be, don't paint the upper sections of rockets, leave them bare metal (no paint chips), burn the motors to exhaustion after deploying your satellites (no fuel explosions) and wherever possible deorbit the final rocket stages as soon as their task is done (no junk). And we should look at moving satellites into disposal orbits when their task is done.
Just my 10 cents worth, but I'll accept a couple of million in 'research grants' if they're going.
Best wishes,
Mike.
In January, 1982, I was coordinating a symposium entitled "Moving Industry Into Space" for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
I had five speakers scheduled for a three hour session, starting at 9:00am, in WAshington, DC. One speaker had double booked himself and was speaking in Europe instead. The secretary of a second speaker called me real early, saying that both transponders on the communications satellite that was at the core of his business had failed during the night and he would have to miss the conference. A third speaker was delayed in transit. He'd been speaking in Spokane, WA the evening before and the best routing I'd been able to find, took him to Texas on a redeye and then up to Washington, DC.
So, at ten minutes before start time, I had two speakers for a three hour session. I walked into the meeting room and saw someone I'd never met (but thought I recognized), sitting in the second row of the audience.
I went up to him, introduced myself, and confirmed that he was, indeed, whom I thought he was. I explained the situation and asked if he'd be willing to speak. He said he wanted to think about it and listen to the other speakers.
So I started the session by introducing the two speakers who were present and the third one who was delayed in transit but expected shortly. Then I said, "and we may have a surprise, too."
Part was through the first presentation, the man in the second row waved me over and said he'd speak if he could go next. I agreed.
When the first speaker was finished, I introduced "the surprise". He was, Dr. Isaac Asimov.
He proceeded to give an excellent, twenty minute presentation about this very subject. His answer was Private Enterprise. He saw an opportunity to make money by collecting the debris in LEO (low earth orbit) and selling it as raw material to space based processing industries.
The major cost associated with anything in LEO is the cost of giving it 5 miles per second of velocity so that it will orbit the earth. The Space Shuttle was supposed to give us a transport cost of $100.00 per pound delivered to LEO. Last I heard, the cost is about $20,000 per pound. The debris already has the necessary energy and is available, free, as salvage.
The complicated part of this business is figuring your orbit changes correctly so you can pick the stuff up with minimum fuel expenditure. Using two ponds of fuel to collect a one pond wrench is not profitable.
Then build the first garbage scow ship of course.
I'll volunteer to take charge of hiring the co-pilot and co-co-pilot.
Some sort of silicon foam that is pressurized in a gigantic can and when sprayed forms a cloud that hardens into some bubbly sticky material. Debris can hit this from any side and either stick to it or penetrate it and decellerate while inside and maybe not even exit it on the other side.
You can't handle the truth.
Build a large net of incredibly durable monofilament strands. Something like fiber-opt, but stronger and more resilient to adverse tempuratures. Use this giant net to do one or more of a few things:
Use the monofilament to slice debris into pieces.
Superheat the strands to melt debris.
Magnetize the net to attract debris for collection.
I figure, if there's material available to the public that is small and sharp enough to be able to cause a brain anneurism just through exposure of the shards to the skin, NASA must be able to come up with something like it that could slice space debris down to the point where the pieces would be no danger.
"Sometimes you have fun, and sometimes the fun has you"
one solution is to use the 11 yrs solar cycle and atmosphere to our advantage - launch low earth orbit satellites low enough so that any flakes that fall off are stripped away by the next 11 yr solar cycle. The solar cycle makes the top of the atmosphere move up a bit so gas drag would help pull the bits in and burn them up. The negative is that if you want your satellite to stay up a long time you'll need to actively boost it (ion motor or some kind of thruster) to keep it up. This would even help reduce the risk of particles from higher orbits because even as they are coming down they don't linger long in the lower attitudes before the atmosphere takes them out (statistics are in your favor more). mark
Why not use a Huge Vacuum cleaner ?
Why not just use a large vacuum cleaner? Might as well make the ship its attached to look like a large statue of liberty figurine for that patriotic feel too.
Welcome to the net of 1000 lies. Upgrades are scheduled soon that should bring us to the 10,000 lies mark.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
What is it gonna do? Give the debris it's 'mad face'?
wah!
aerogel coated craft, or maybe alternating layers of aerogel and another material, like liquidmetal or kevlar, to take the force away from the impacts
It was out in 1978 for nine episodes. Richard Benjamin starred as the captain of a garbage-collecting space ship. No, I'm not making this up!
We just have to design our satelittes with armor. That way, when the inevitable alien invasion comes, our spacecract will already be well protected!
My motto: "A cat is no trade for integrity."
We could shake the Earth until the debris fall off, just like dandruff. :-)
Probably want to make it out of tangled "spider silk" threads - so it tends not to add to the debris problem after something passes through it. Also, it would be somewhat "springy" - giving more time to absorb the kinetic energy of an impact.
Maybe add technology to quickly spot threads that do get blown loose from the main mass, and charge them up with an electron gun so they'll be pulled back into the main mass before they can get very far.
Electronic warfare in Afghanistan?
Posted by Kredal on Friday July 12, @01:45PM
from the c64s-in-the-middle-east dept.
g-w-bush asks: "I've been asked to come up with a plan to take out the bad men living in caves, and making sure they can't get to the internet. Does anyone know how I can best take care of this? I'd love to be able to tell those Generals that I'm actually smart, but I need your help. Email your suggestions to me"
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Dr. Evil steps in,
I propose we build a giant space ship that can transform into a very large maid with a vacuum. I call my invention ""Mega Maid"". We have ""Mega Maid"" set the vacuum to "suck" and orbit the planet a few times sucking up the debree. Of course, there's not enough gas in orbit to provide the sucking action, so ""Mega Maid"" may skim a few layers of our atmosphere off to complete the process. When ""Mega Maid"" is done, she will switch from "suck" to "blow", disbursing all the troublesome debree into the sun... Including the planet's precious atmosphere! Muahahahaha Muahahahaa Muahahahahahahaha
What we need is a BIG sheet of fly-paper.
grep >= ! == $your
1. Send up something that acts as a switchable magnet.
2. Repeat if necessary to do regional cleaning.
3. Instead of trying to get rid of it, save it.
4. Because eventually alloys and other materials are going to be manufactured in orbit on ISS and future stations, or on the moon and maybe even mars.
In other words, don't view this as garbage cleanup and disposal, but rather as orbital mining and recycling. As a matter of fact, it might just be a good idea to continue contributing to the orbital junk - just make sure it gets collected so as to keep the "orbiways" clear.
=8-)
OK, time for a little orbital machanics
Sweeping out a single orbit would be like driving through a staight city street at high speed with a bulldozer and then thinking you did not have to stop at stop lights on that road because you cleared everything out of that path two hours ago.
Objects start mostly going in the same direction, but the tidal forces of the moon distort the orbit and twist it until it is following some other path. (of course we also have the polar orbits the military use)
Most of these objects quickly hit the atmosphere, Many stay up for years and a few probably get ejected out of earth orbit.
It is the intersections you have to watch out for
I started thinking about this issue and I had some ideas.
Lets not talk about pieces which are big enough to track. That is a separate issue.
Let's try to improve the ecology of space, to clean it up in general. By sweeping through space with something. I believe that most objects when stuck would loose enough speed that they would fall into the atmosphere. But the impact would create lots of little particles which would in the short term make things worse. Most of these new particles would be from the sweeper ship. The problem is now that these particles can damage things themselves (actually, I believe the sweeper itself would be in the most danger.) Can the particles be made non damaging to other space craft? What if we made the sweeper out of ice. The particles would freeze dry in a short time and no longer be a problem. A little water vapor would not punch a hole in a space craft no mater how fast it was going.
This leads to the following question: What if we just sprayed a bunch of water vapor into low earth orbit and used that to slow down the junk?
Some one want to take a crack at the following questions:
How much water vapor?
Ecological impact?
Does the amount of vapor needed, put an end to all ideas of being able to sweep random tiny objects from low earth orbit?
Why dont they just stick one of those lasers the marines are testing for mine removal, but with more power, just burn the trash right out.
cooling shouldnt be aproblem since they are in space....
How about developing some kind of electrostatic forcefield? Sure it will require tons of energy, but it could benefit military applications back on Earth too.
The problem with anything sticky is that you only get a single layer of stuck things before things stop sticking.
I'm thinking of a catcher with a simple enough mechanism to be effective, unlikely to break, unlikely to spill its load, and easy to re-use.
Imagine a cone-shaped device. The idea, of course, would be to fly the cone into debris which is, presumably, travelling at a slightly slower velocity than the cone. At the short end of the cone is a set of spring-powered doors, just like in an ashtray. You can push them down and things can enter, then the doors close back up.
I've never seen anything like this, but I'm imagining some kind of arms with "hands" on the end, which move towards and into the "doors", pushing anything that's there along with them. Debris is trapped in a "trash bag", and then you can send it to a fiery doom or pick it up in a shuttle, as you need. Mount this thing on some sort of robot that flies around getting in the way of debris.
I suppose the efficacy of this depends on the ability of a robot to use sensors and machine intelligence to a) differentiate between debris and floating astronauts and ships, and b) the amount of fuel it can carry wrt its cruising speed, range, amount it can push back or down, etc. But it seems like it has the potential for cheapness and reusability.
Since the space shuttles are already being launched, why not add a retractable magnet that acts like a lightning rod to them?
The purpose of a lightning rod is to attract lightning where you want it, so it doesn't go in any random place it wants to.
If a shuttle was launched with retractable magnets on various places of the ship, at least some of the objects out there, especially the smaller, magnetic ones, will be picked up.
Just extend the arms out once in space, let them collect the debris, and then retract them when they're about to leave. The material brought back can be reused for whatever the space agency wants.
Put blobs of "bio-friendly" acid into space. The acid melts away debris. When the acid de-orbits there wont be massive extinctions.
i forsee millions of kids getting on to play "space blasters" where they win extra points for successfuly elminating space crap.
of course what's to stop that malicous 14 year old that instead of shooting up his school decides to waste one of the transatlantic satellites?
lol
hey it could happen
OK, here is my contribution to humanity :) First, we need to think big. I mean, really big.
A ground-based laser is expensive, but if you can remove the ridiculous power requirements, it is the best solution for our problem- more on my solution in a moment.
Contrary to popular belief, we do NOT have to completely vaporize the debris. We only have to impart a slight thrust via partial vaporization to a part of the debris. This will create a cloud of gas, cause it spin, and change its orbit. Since most of the debris we are talking about is in LEO, it will eventually burn up in the upper atmosphere. Getting rid of debris in GEO is a much tougher problem.
Now, the laser. We have the technology to build a massive, solar-pumped, dye (or solid) laser. Very little electricity would be required! By creating two of these, one pumps the other, we can pulse them for dramatically increased power, but I would like to see what we can do with it in a continuous wave mode, since it has never been done. I won't go into details on the design, but we are talking about a Megawatt class laser. If we can get a hold of the adaptive optics and other Star Wars era (!) rapid repositioning and precision pointing (R2P2), this could work.
Caveat! This laser would have to be built in a dry environment (read cloudless) and will only work in direct sunlight.
Late!
_A_Mad_Scientist
Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle lucid dreaming.
Simple! Just use the deflector. Plans to build, fix, and tune one can be found by watching startrek.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
I had to debate Space topic way back in 1990, at that time Kumar Ramohalli had prototyped his space junk robot. He's with LPL (Lunar Planetary Lab) at the University of Arizona. It's called ASPOD - the Autonomous Space Processor for Orbital Debris. See google cache (cause page isn't loading)
ASPOD page
Hi All -
The moderator noted that the "laser broom" wasn't mentioned. I wrote the article and did cover this topic. Understandably, SPACE.com has a page weight limitation and length limitation to suit readers' preferences. As a result, this section was left out. I hope it proves useful here:
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Hi All -
The moderator noted that the "laser broom" wasn't mentioned. I wrote the article and did cover this topic. Understandably, SPACE.com has a page weight limitation and length limitation to suit readers' preferences. As a result, this section was left out. I hope it proves useful here.
START
Even further off is the chance of an International Space Station commander eying a wayward wrench hurtling toward sleeping quarters and shouting, in the style of Captain Kirk, "Raise shields!" U.S. military labs are developing such protection for combat, especially for ships to make them lighter without sacrificing security. The vessels would be clad in tiles of plastic, optical fibers, armor, and metal coils. Incoming shells would cut through the fibers like trip wires, signaling capacitors to send an electric surge through the coils. That would create an electromagnetic field to dissipate the enemy shell. For a debris field, this would certainly be overkill, but even a scaled-down version would consume too much energy on a station power by wings of photovoltaic cells and popular opinion isn't likely to support a nuclear reactor in orbit. "I don't know of anybody who's researching this," Johnson noted.
Another page from science fiction is also unlikely to be turned anytime soon. Lasers have long been looked to as a solution - not to blast debris into oblivion, but to nudge it aside. Even heating a very small surface of debris can release vapors sufficient to alter its course, sending it away from the space station or a sensitive satellite.
"The concept is that ground based lasers could find very small debris and perturb its orbit to make it fall back more quickly. You push it further out, but what you're also doing is making the ellipse of its orbit more eccentric so it will come closer in as well as further out," Johnson said. The idea was circulated a few years ago under the name "Project Orion" and dubbed a "laser broom" but it was quietly shelved again. "It's a good idea that predates Project Orion by many years. The Russians thought of the same thing. But no one thought way of doing it well and cheaply enough to afford," Johnson added. Other factors putting the idea back in the laser broom closet are that such a device would demand too much energy from the space station, and that ground and space-based lasers could run into international objections.
In short, holes will happen. The obvious answer is a patch. Sverdrup Inc. and engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center developed the Kermit (Kit for Repair of Module Impacts) is a clear plastic plate ringed by a foam gasket. A central bolt connects it to the hull while adhesive is injected beneath an interior metal plate. The kit is meant to patch holes up to several inches across, and cracks up to eight inches long.
I saw something recently where they deployed a long metal wire from the space shuttle. Seeing as the wire is moving over the earths magnetic field it generated alot of electricity.
This also causes ??electromagnetic drag?? which which would lower the objects orbit.
If every satelite was equipped with one of these deployable wires. When it reached the end of it's life deploy the wire. The satelite will lose altitude and then burn up in the atmosphere.
Roger Wilco? I hear he's free, hasn't been working in quite a while.
in your expensive EVA Suit?
Honestly, its enough to make your blood boil!!
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
Yah, starting with the Moon... oops.
If you could get Venus to flip the Moon away without a collision, you could wind up with a situation not unlike Robert L Forward's Rocheworld from Flight of the Dragonfly where the ocean sloshes between Earth and Venus (fsssssh!) - but I don't think we'd be very talented Flouwen; or Bob Shaw's Land and Overland from The Wooden Spaceships which involves hot-air ballooning from planet to planet and battles with muzzle-loading cannon and solid-fuel rockets in zero G (but in atmosphere).
PS, I've greatly enjoyed reading everything of Robert Forward's that I've laid hands on, especially the Dragon's Egg series. Bob Shaw not so, but I did like TWS.
BTW, we may know how to move planets, but that is probably the main reason for us not doing so. Our accountants forbid it. Like Archimedes, we `lever alone'.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Just put a big fan up there and blow everything into a different galaxy!
(Wait...what? No air? DAMMIT.)
[insert witty comment here]
hi there Alistair here
i lodt my log in due to a reformat
look at what we have to use, ground based is cheaper the earth generates a lot of power in the form of lightning if we could manage it on a grid that redirectes it to the array the earth would power itself to clean it's skin ( atmosphere) , pity it's not star trek cause if the earth could radiate a cycling pulse from itself just enough to move smal things higher all the time but not really move bigger things like satalites