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The NY Times has a good story about a push for international action, via the UN, on the growing problem of space debris. Includes a pretty picture of a space shuttle window that got nailed by a fleck of paint.
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...is that it is a chain reaction. It is relatively safe up there at the moment, but if we ever get a satelite (say) hit then the debris caused by it's disintergration will cause further problems. I am sure those with even the slightest imagination can see the ongoing process that happens next. You want to go up after that has been becoming exponetially worse for a year or two?
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
I've wondered about this as a problem for a while. Wouldnt it be advantageous to the UN to clean up a majority of the stuff (manmade) in space to prevent further problems such as the speculated involvement in the recent Columbia crash?
;-p What are the odds something like this becomes viable?
On that note, has anyone else wondered what it would be like to take landfills, package them in rockets, shoot them to the sun and see what happens or am I the only one who has strange dreams like that.
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
I don't understand why this isn't being looked into more as a reason for the Columbia disaster. If you look at the latest issue of US News, on about page 8, they have a handy dandy map of space debris. It looks like the whole earth has a white halo due to the sheer amount of it.
Yes, many of the trash right now is relatively small, however when doe sit get "big" enought to clean it, if you wait and wait until it really becomes a problem, then it is already to late. And this has nothing to do with the Columbia, the trash is in a totally different part of the atmosphere.
dam(u)
Useless sig.
... is orbital garbage collection. When you see the damage a paint chip can cause, imagine the damage a 1" steel ball bearing (moving at 50,000mph) could do.
Here's an idea: equip a spacecraft with a giant kevlar net and put it into orbit to collect debris, then jettison the debris bag to impact the Moon. It's just barren rock sitting there unused, the Moon would be the perfect orbital landfill. Hmm... kind of an Orbital Quicker-Picker-Upper. Maybe we could get corporate sponsorship from Bounty to offset the cost...
not to mention it would take one hell of a shot to hit a fleck of paint 10 miles up moving at 17,000 mph. =)
It would be extremely difficult to track small pieces of debris. That's why you have to get rid of junk when it's big....before it becomes little pieces.
Remember, the energy a moving mass has (kinetic energy) is defined as:
Kinetic Energy = 1/2 * mass * velocity ^ 2
What that means is that velocity is much more important than mass. To give an example, a small bolt about 1/4" in diameter traveling at 17,500 mph has the same kinetic energy as a bowling ball traveling at 60 mph.
Yikes!
-A
The ISS has some interesting features to make it space debris resistant. Apparently the sleeping quarters (and hopefully anything else that has humans in it) has several layers of high strength fabric separated by quite a bit of empty volume in order to soak up the kinetic energy of space debris as it will inevitably hit the station. Of course, this approach is difficult for a launch or re-entry vehicle since the gaurd would have to be deployed after launch and retracted before re-entry.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
Is there any reason that we can't send up a satilite with some manuvering thrusters, with an electronic magnet attached to it, which we could activate/deactivate? Then we could just manuver it into positions near debris, activate the magnet, dump it into some sort of cargo bay, and once it's full, have it burn up in the atmosphere.
Couldn't be too expensive, and sounds pretty simple...?
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
is Elbonia going to chair the space debris committee?
The space debris committee is a long way off. First, the UN must pass at least a dozen toothless resolutions over a ten-year period calling for the voluntary dismantling of space debris.
When that doesn't happen and the USA decides it's a matter of national security to do something about it, France, Germany, and other dictator-loving countries will protest loudly that the space debris must be inspected more vigorously (which is a sham, of course, as French space companies a vested interest in maintaining their billion-euro contracts with the space debris).
Actors will protest. "What about the children of the space debris?" they will ask. Communist and socialist sympathizers, along with their friends at CNN, will complain loudly "America is ignoring the voice of the world community!" Dan Rather will come to our rescue when he proclaims "Like it or not, he's still our President". Of special note will be the [un]American Democratic Party, which will profess to have a plan of it's own that calls for billions and billions of taxes (gathered only from the rich, of course) to be spent on a government program investigating the habitat of space debris.
And finally, a good ol' boy from Texas will have enough balls to do something about it. The rest of the world will hate him for it, even if they do sleep easier.
Small question, having heard for a while about the problems of space junk...
If that one-centimeter pellet is going 20,000 mph faster than the shuttle, wouldn't it be in a much higher orbit? And if the shuttle is going 20,000 mph faster than the pellet, wouldn't the pellet be in a lower orbit (i.e. on the ground)? And if they're both going at 20,000 mph... what's the problem?
I know that LEO is getting pretty damn crowded with junk, but what are the real differences in relative speed at that altitude/orbit? Without the 20,000 mph FUD?
-T
Not to support crazy science fiction ideas, but I do remember -a while back- an article that discussed a "plasma" field that could be created around a spaceship (or whatever) that could exert force on objects entering that field. I recall that the author stated it was a neat thing to see with the eye, and the scientists who created it were sticking their fingers into it. It wasn't strong enough to do anything but make a tingling sensation, and it glowed a blue color if I remember correctly
(quotes around plasma because I can't remember the term they used)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/25/163522 8&mode=thread
y /cold_plasma_000724.html
Force Fields And Plasma Shields Get Closer
Posted by timothy on 03:23 AM July 26th, 2000
from the use-half-power-for-melting-butter dept.
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technolog