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.

Comments

Re:Sticky Umbrella

[God! Awful]

How about a large dish coated with a think layer of soft material which you put into an orbit you want to clean and after its been there for a while fire the retros and burn the lot up in the atmosphere.

For some reason, one thing I haven't seen people mention so far in this thread is the fact that to be in orbit at a given height above Earth, you have to be travelling at a very specific orbital velocity. So the umbrella either has to be going with the flow, in which case it's not going to catch up to any of the space debris (unless the debris has an eccentric orbit), or against the flow, in which case it is going to impact the space debris with a very high velocity.

I suppose a third option is to have it going with the flow, but faster than orbital velocity, in which case it's going to need a lot of fuel... (remember, a spacecraft has to eject balast every time it changes direction, otherwise conservation of momentum would be violated.)

-a

We have the technology...

[mysticgoat]

• Gauss guns in orbit
• Shooting hollow beebees full of water-ice at some multiple of escape velocity
• Effective range: on the order of 1 Earth diameter (limited by accuracy aiming mechanism)
• Solar powered
• Using banks of capicitors extracted by /.ers from discarded disposable cameras
• on-board robotics with Forth and Legos (well, maybe Legos only for the early prototypes)
• strategic AI via earthbased voluntary distributed computing system (or a beowulf cluster of US Government excessed 486 boxen)
• knock the junk
  1. into decaying orbits or
  2. a designated "trash ring" or
  3. push it to escape velocity
  depending on specifics of each piece of junk
• Funding partially by corporate sponsorship ("Legos in orbit")

Funny 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"