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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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saw that same photo years ago in elementary school
been a couple months, but I remember pointing and clicking on the same idea, perhaps to somewhere else, but most definatly on /.
...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..."
...is useless. The small size of objects large enough to do serious damage means that they're probably extremely difficult to track. What else is there? Design a giant space dump truck to scoop it all up? Sounds more expensive than new shuttles.
I am aware of a system atop Haleakala (the 10,000 ft high volcano on the island of Maui) that tracks space debris. Anyone know of others?
-azmaveth
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.
We must focus on our Energy shields and Deflector beams. C'mon, NASA. Get it together.
I think the editors are trying to push the Tom's Hardware dupe off the front page :)
Vote for global prefs bug
I thought that since space was empty, we would be able to fit a lot of junk up there. Are we already reaching our quota?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/18/science/space/18 TRAF.html?ex=1046149200&en=f39397b7a99dc415&ei=506 2&partner=GOOGLE
Use user/pass: slashdot_coward
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
The proposed "space elevator" previously discussed here would seem to be something of a fixed target for space junk...
This is pretty old news but it's got better pics. Norad has been tracking space trash for decades. Fact of the matter is, there is trash up there, yes it can hurt you or the shuttle, or the hubble, etc. But the odds are very slim for most orbits. The hubble got hit with a little piece once, but the odds are pretty slim anything we send up will get hit by debris.
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
How could a group of utterly clueless politicians do anything useful about space junk? They'd form a committee and assign a bunch of 3rd-world communists to blame it all on the US.
Let's try to be somewhat accurate, it will be the US cleaning it up.
US military is spending billions on developing a missile defense system. You'd think they could use the same technologies to vaporize space junk. All you need is really powerful laser either shot fired from the ground or airborne 747.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
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.
Personally, I think the only reason the UN exists is to give these third-world countries and former world powers some kind of forum where they get the illusion that they are important. Kind of like Slashdot, but in a real-world sense.
One would HOPE that the UN would be laying the groundwork for something useful, like world-wide civil rights, healthcare standards, public health, preventing hunger, stopping leaders of countries from bankrupting their countries by enriching themselves, environment standards, and other useful things.
Instead, they get to complain about Israel, do nothing about attrocities committed in places like North Korea, the Middle East, Africa, etc.
Its not that they dont care, but if it doesnt help them get laid in New York its kind of beneath the radar.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Uhhh.... I think the UN might be a little busy at the moment. Please try again after the war...
How about once a day Slashdot just lists all of the stories they want us to read at the NYT at places them together in one post.
That would reduce the number of stories on the front page by 1/2.
... 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...
Given that Libya chairs the UN human rights committee, and Iraq is scheduled to chair the disarmament committee later this year, is Elbonia going to chair the space debris committee?
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
Ya, the windshield was cracked by some space debris. But it didnt contribute to the vehicle getting destroyed.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
You think Earth's got problems? Imagine the space debris problem in the Endor system. I mean, hell, the entire death star exploded - and that thing was friggin' HUGE! I mean, there you are, heading towards a nice vacation on Endor's forest moon, planning on partying down with the Ewoks, when all of a sudden - WHAM! little Palpatine bits are impacting against your YT1300 cockpit windows. I wouldn't want to be the clean-up crews working the Alderaan, Yavin, or Endor star systems. You'd be there for as long as it takes a Sarlaac to digest a barge full of Hutts...
Interplanetary litter bugs.
Fear is the mind killer.
This system will completely eliminate the problem of small debris at a low cost: Use an electrostatically charged sacrificial beacon to attract all the particles with neutral and opposite charges, while repelling everything else.
Repeal the DMCA!
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.
... a potential victim, or a potential cleaner?
Before long, those bastards will have a union and a quota.
Wait until the end the month, when it will be tickets for speeding over a school zone or for improperly parking the orbiter when you KNOW you were between the lines and there was enough time left on the meter.
The whole point is that the odds don't stay slim. "Orbital cascade", as mentioned in other posts in this thread. One big bit becomes many smaller bits, those smaller bits might each render another satellite/astronaut/flying saucer into lots more small bits, and so on. Something you can only hope to avoid, since there's no great way of clearing it up once the problem becomes serious.
The link in the article is broken. Either the newspaper is routing webpage requests to some login page for reporters, or the actual link to the article is wrong. I can tell this because a newspaper wouldn't have it's readers log in
You're new here, aren't you?
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
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
except using the sun would be like having the incinerator for an apartment building on the moon...
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
With the UN in charge, if someone broke the rules the UN would say, "Stop! or we'll say 'Stop!', again".
The UN has proven on numerous occassions that they are nothing but pencil pushing bureaucrates who, at best, do nothing, but all too often simply make the situation worse.
Look at Rwanda. Given the job of protecting 100,000 unarmed refugees, the UN security force DID NOTHING when a warlord's army arrived and proceeded to slaughter every man, woman, and child.
So now someone wants to give the UN the job of reducing space junk? No thank you, I'd rather take my chances with out their help.
-- Will program for bandwidth
If that were true then Battlestar Gallactica wouldn't make any sense at all.
KFG
"Because the material is moving at such high speeds, even a small chunk can cause potentially lethal damage. A collision with a small piece of space junk remains high on NASA's list of possible explanations for the puncture that apparently led to the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia as it re-entered the atmosphere."
"Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased. Thus we refute entropy" - Spider Robinson
Am I the only person that's noticed all you have to do is slap ?partner=GOOGLE on the end of a NewYork Times URL and it won't force you to register? Point in case for this article:
8 TRAF.html?...&partner=GOOGLE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/18/science/space/1
Here is the NASA site with impact photos of the Mir, the space shuttle and another satellite called the LDEF: http://hitf.jsc.nasa.gov/hitfpub/problem/actualimp acts.html.
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
In order for a space garbage collector to work, it would have to go chasing after a large number of peices of junk moving in different orbits. In order to catch a particular piece of space junk, it would have to both match the junk's velocity and possition, then fire up its engines again and go after some other peice of space junk. Even if one could come up with a very efficient algorythm for chasing down the junk, the garbage collector would have to have its engines on nearly all the time. If it used a traditional rocket, it would run out of fuel in at best a couple of days. If it used the microwave heated xeon type it would be collecting garbage for centuries if not millenia.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
This problem was solved long ago by bird hunters here on Earth. When you are trying to shoot at a small high-speed target, what do you use? A shotgun!
We need a space-shotgun mounted on some satellite, firing a large number of small projectiles in a spread. That way, the chances of actually hitting the space junk (thereby making orbit safer) is much greater.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Johnny Cochrane: Ladies and Gentlemen, (Pulls down picture of Chewbacca) this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wooky from the planet Kishic, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it. That does not make sense. Gerald (Whispering): Dammit. Chef (Whispering): What? Gerald (Whispering): He's using the Chewbacca defense. Johnny Cochrane: Why would a Wooky, an eight-foot-tall Wooky, want to live on Endor with a bunch of two-foot-tall Ewoks. That does not make sense. But more important, you have to ask yourself what does this have to do with this case. [Jury stares in silence] Johnny Cochrane: Nothing. Ladies and Gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case. [Gerald sinks back and covers his eyes] Johnny Cochrane: It does not make sense. Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and Gentlemen I'm am not making any sense. None of this makes sense. And so you have to remember when you're in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No. Ladies and Gentlemen of this deposed jury it does not make sense. If Chewbacca lives on Endor you must acquit. The defense rests.
Quote from the article (since I know most of you didn't read it)
In 1961, sensitive American and Soviet radar watching for World War III detected only 50 manufactured objects, burned-out rocket stages and the like, circling the globe.
The list of orbiting objects tracked by an array of military radars and telescopes now tops 10,000, but these are only the bits large enough to be routinely tracked -- things larger than a softball.
I would imagine that radar has become a bit more refined in the last 30+ years, so this statistic should be taken with a grain of salt.
ps, it's somewhat offtopic, but does anyone have a link to stats regarding the ratio of visible natural meteors flaming through the atmosphere vs. man made ones doing the same?
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
Sounds more expensive than new shuttles.
So, stop polluting space. And while you're on in, also stop polluting your local neighbourhood, the air that you breath and the water you drink.
Cleaning up afterwards is always more expensive than preventing it from polluting in the first place. But then, you don't make friends with reminding people about it.
bash$
This manga, drawn by Makoto Yukimura, is about an aspiring astronaut (sp?) that starts his career as a lowly space garbage collector. The story is very interesting as it explains the life and perils of being astronauts. It also explains the danger of excessive garbage in space (it is even used as a plot device in book 2, but I won't spoil it! :)
Guess what? There is a free online version! It is located here. (Shockwave Player required), courtesy the editor (Kodansha).
Select the first episode. The shockwave file is an animated version of the first few chapters.
You don't need to understand japanese because it is subtitled in english.
Happy reading!
PS: I know about it because it is translated in French :)
All of you in France, I highly recommend this manga.
I didn't find an english translation of it, AFAICG (as far as I can google).
This article brings to mind a major, but unnoticed fatal flaw in Regan's Star Wars program which sought to put killer sattelites in space to protect the American People: all an enemy needed to do to take said network out was launch a handful of rockets to the same orbit to explosively release simple payloads of (many) ball bearings. No cost-effective defense against it.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
A closer look revealed radiating webs of damage in the outermost of three layered panes of heavy glass. When the window was removed back on Earth, the embedded mote was found to contain traces of aluminum and titanium. It was a fleck of paint, most likely from a derelict rocket casing. If it had been slightly heavier, the window could have imploded, killing the crew, experts concluded.
"Imploded"? I'll bet the "experts" concluded no such thing, if they were worthy of the name. With 1 atmosphere of pressure inside the vehicle and 0 pressure outside, the window would have exploded, not imploded. The writer was probably thinking by analogy with a CRT, which will indeed implode if shattered because there's a vaccuum inside. On orbit, the vaccuum is outside.
Sheesh!
And the brethren went away edified.
While space management may be a good idea, allowing the UN to do it is a very bad idea.
IMO, there is not really anything the UN ever did that was good. I don't mind nations getting together for large scale projects such as this, but the UN is a waste of money. I blew of some steam in a journal entry.
Have you read my journal today?
for all those funny mod points you got from playing off me post =)
Seriously, doesn't the technology exist for a rudimentary thing like this by now?
Would greatly increase safety 'up there'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Send in Captain Quark.
"routinely sweep a 30-mile box"
.0015 h = 5.4 s
"20,000 mph"
"softball"
30 miles / 20,000 mph =
So, basically, the tech on the radar will have enough time to tell his supe that the spacecraft is about to be annihilated.
Sending into the sun, you have to apply lots of horizontal thrust to reduce the angular momentum imparted from earth to put the garbage into a collision course with sun, instead of orbiting around it.
Evicting from sun's gravity involves adding lots of kinetic energy to give the garbage escape velocity (no cheating and using slingshot effects).
Even with no cheating, it still requires less energy to kick something out of the solar system than send it into the sun. Interesting little problem, we solved it in my classical mechanics class many moons ago.
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)
Hey, where's the obligatory "(free reg, yada yada)" after "NY Times"?
But, a highly elliptical orbit will have an object moving SIGNIFICANTLY faster at it's perigee (closest point to sun) than a corresponding circular orbit at the radius of the perigee. Kepler's 2nd law (equal areas swept out in equal times).
Just for completeness, Kepler's 1st law says bound gravitional systems move in elliptical orbits, with the gravitational source at one of the focii.
So, yes, it is quite possible that at any point one can encounter an object moving significantly faster.
who's been playing paintball at the ISS?
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
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
...and run it around the cluttered orbits backwards for a year.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The UN can barely manage itself, let alone pull the nessisary resources together to enact such a project. In the end, the bulk of the initiative would be shouldered by the US or Russia. The UN wouldn't be doing but playing the proverbial supervisor. Heck, maybe they could send inspectors into sp-- Oh! MwaAhahahahah!!!
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Computer-simulated pictures of orbiting space debris suffer from the same problem that images of our solar system do:
Each individual 'thing' (piece of debris/planet) is incredibly tiny compared to the size of the background object (Earth/the solar system). If they showed an actual scale model of the solar system on your (for example) 1600x1200 screen, even jupiter would be well under a pixel wide (in fact, Jupiter's diamater is about 1/40,000th the size of the mean distance from Pluto to the Sun).
Same thing for Earth orbit space debris - sure, there are tens of thousands of objects up there - but the biggest thing we've ever sent into space is only a few hundred yards long, and the vast majority of these things measure in the inches. The Earth is more than 12 MILLION yards wide.
Point is, you wouldn't see anything on any real scale model of either the Earth or the solar system. They artificially blow up the little things so it has some relevance to us feeble humans. Not that this lessens the danger from space debris, mind you - it's just nowhere near as bad as it looks from the pretty pictures.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
...and Mercury, retrograde and very close in. If it's aimed straight at the Sun, the velocity won't matter.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Iraq probably makes more money selling black-market oil, chemical weapons, plutonium, and anthrax than they could make legitimately without UN Sanctions.
Somalia practically laughed at the UN. Anyone else who has been the target of a UN Peacekeeping Force basically got to beat up on a lot of foreigners (that being the UN). I would rather be Mike Tyson's sparing partner than a UN Peacekeeper- you have a lower risk of injury or death.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Since google is a NYTimes partner, it's possible to click to google and thence to the NYTimes article without allowing nytimes.com to track you. For example, for this story, click here: Wanted: Traffic Cops for Space site:nytimes.com and then click the resulting NYtimes story.
"A gun is a tool, Marian. No better, no worse than any other tool. An axe, a shovel, or anything." Shane (1953)
doesn't involve "Stanley Spaceman"
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Maybe we could send people on community service up there to clean it up?
the only surprising thing about the article is the apparent disregard for collision hazards that various space agencies have had. this is not a new problem, in fact it's been known about for decades. how, then, is it possible for a manned capsule to be threatened with implosion in this manner?
surely, safety mechanisms (say, an internal airlock hooked up to a barometer), as on a submarine, are worth implementing. or would it be too much of a payload to send up there?
or even (fantastically), a "giant nano-sponge, scouring the orbits". there's got to be a solution, somewhere.
this - plus the recent loss of the Challenger - once more reminds me that for all the huff, puff and political aggrandizement, it is still (effectively) the age of guys floating around in tin cans.
<B>note to self:</B> <I>post as html</I>
I have a paranoid worry that North Korea, or someone else who doesn't like US spy sattelites overhead is going to launch a rocket load of gravel into low earth orbit.
If someone put 1000 pounds of gravel into orbit, it would destroy the usefulness of space and trap us on this planet. Yeah we would still have stuff in geo-stat, but we'd have a lot of trouble getting anything new up there.
Maybe I just need to calm down and have some more coffee.
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
Anyone else who has been the target of a UN Peacekeeping Force basically got to beat up on a lot of foreigners.
The only comments I see here are on the quality of the peace keeping forces that have been deployed at various times, and their willingness to simply do the job at hand (as opposed to 'just having a presence'). It also touches on the reduced effectiveness of a peace keeping force when it is 'multi-national'.
When a peace keeping force comprised almost entirely of Australian soldiers was sent into East Timor to combat the Indonesian backed militia, the result was very different. Arguably the single most *effective* UN backed peace keeping force ever deployed.
Why aren't NASA working on some sort of strong electromagnetic field that could surround the shuttle or other misc space vehicle and deflect, or at least slow, space debris before impact? This would probably help work as most space debris is has some iron in it.
It might also help protect the astronauts from those cosmic rays that start to cause a problem once you get out of the earths own magnetic field.
If you don't think this is a good idea please say why.
Oh that's really going to help. At that speed a spacecraft will cover that distance in, oh let me see, about 5 seconds! Doesn't sound like a lot of time to me to move a massive spacecraft onto a different trajectory.
First line of the UN Charter:
"WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war".
Skiing? Check out The Independant Skiers Portal
"How could a group of utterly clueless politicians do anything useful about space junk?"
One politician can absorb quite a lot of kinetic energy...
There's some info and a really cool animation (gif) at the Aerospace Corporation Site that gives a little sense of the amount of junk out there.
The Johnson Space Center orbital debris site used to have some nice graphics too, but it's currently out.
This is addressed to all the posters who posted varients of "Why don't we just catch all the junk?"
Since you don't understand the problem, allow me to offer to help you understand it.
Come to my house. We'll go into the back yard, and I'll shoot at you with my AR-15. You catch the bullets. That's MUCH easier than catching orbital debris - the bullets are much larger (40 grains is roughly 2 grams) and MUCH slower (3600 feet per second is roughly 1 km/sec). Also, you will know ahead of time where the bullet will be - I'll make it easy and aim right at you.
Now, when you can catch those bullets, you can move up to orbital debris - much smaller, much faster, and moving on unknown trajectories.
"But we'll just use a big Kevlar net! We won't have to know where the bullets are heading!"
Fine. Here's your Kelvar net, about 1km on a side. It will only take about 1000 years to catch most of the debris, since "Space is big. Really really big. You can't believe just how mind-bogglingly huge space it".
To simulate the launch, let's go to Colorado Springs. I'll pay your way into Pike's Peak. Go to the top of Pike's Peak with the net - it's only a couple of tons. No, you cannot drive - you have to walk. I'll wait. That will help you understand the COST of putting your big net into space.
DON'T take what you see on Star Dreck as reality - space is HUGE, junk is SMALL. This is not a simple problem.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I hate to say it then, why doesn't Slashdot just become a farking NYTimes partner? Oh right, OSDN(VA Software) is still losing money. Nevermind.
You can be going at walking pace or 0.5c, and if the dotted line which represents your path intersects the (more or less) cylinder which represents the Sun's path, all of your worries will soon be over.
So, if you skipped past Venus, killed a little velocity and wound up looping (either out or in will work), and did a low, slow pass over Mercury (spend an hour going past, turn by roughly 12km/s, a manouver which could even add velocity if you liked) which then put you in the path of the Sun, it wouldn't matter that you still have over 20km/s under your belt. Air (hydrogen, anyway) resistance would soon cure that...
The simple way would be to launch in the right direction from Earth, but that would also involve burning the most fuel.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Not to reinforce this guys tripe (because it was tripe), but you're just encouraging him to continue to do so, by giving him attention. Leave the tool unmoderated at 1, and ignore him.
;-)
And as much as I love my astronauts, and my country, and my citizens, and my space program (yes, I pay for it, it's mine too!). I don't consider them heroes. Heroes are people who go out every day in do hard things. Those astronauts were recipients of the ultimate social program, the US Military Industrial Complex. Have a "Navy SEAL BUD/S" type lottery for ordinary normal American's like you and me to compete for a seat on those rockets, and I'd consider the astronauts heroes.
I consider them heroes simply for signing up for armed service, and putting their lives on the line for me, not because they strap themselves to 4 million pounds of explosives and metal all built by the lowest bidder.
But he's a tool. Don't respond to tools.
Have a day.
Everyone knows it. All the nations who can reach space have informal agreements with each other that if something gets put in orbit, something must come down.
NASA is fully aware of the high-velocity bolt problem, and consequently they try to avoid or minimize human spacewalks when they can. Imagine the Uber-whinefest that will erupt when an astronaut is pegged by a flying paint chip as he steps outside the shuttle to look for wing damage.
NASA and others have been looking at ways to scoop up space debris since at least the mid-70's. The problems are primarily physics and the vastness of space. How does one cheaply and safely hoover up particles in orbit? The most sensible proposal I've seen is to send huge catcher-mitt panels coated on one side with several inches of material akin to solid butter, right at known micro-clouds of debris.
But, trying to catch a wayward bolt that everyone forgot about for 30 years? It just ain't gonna happen.