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

Here it comes...

[JohnPM]

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.

Obligatory Spaceballs reference

[BabyDave]

"Spaceball 1 has now become ... Mega Maid!"

Where's Wilco when you need him!?!

[rasjani]

I think NASA should hire Roger Wilco to clean up the mess. He has excellent CV for this kind of stuff..

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

Collect it as ballast for tether/space elevator

[apsmith]

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).