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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..."
...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 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
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.
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.
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...
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?
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
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...
However, I kind of question the value of this going thru the UN, especially when there are less than five countries in the world capable of going into space. Its pretty much the US, Russia, I think someone in Europe (unless they just use Russia), and potentially China, depending on how their new space program pans out.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Don't be ridiculous. Like slashdot would ever dupe articles; I mean, there are a bunch of people working there, they post only a handful of stories a day, and it takes what, a few seconds to check whether an article is a dupe? Do you really think they wouldn't take those 10 seconds to check?
I think you owe the editors an apology for even insinuating such a thing.
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.
I hate to appear snide ( when I don't mean to that is), but go out on some dark night. Look up.
You'll see stuff.
Ok, let's make it a little more interesting. Go out on a night that isn't so dark, because there's a half moon out. Bring a pair of binoculars with you.
Look at the moon. Notice that it's all coverd with holes. Those holes were caused by things in "empty" space hitting the moon. Amazingly big holes can be made by surprisingly small bits of stuff if they hit with enough energy.
The weight of the earth actually increases by tons every day from all the stuff in "empty" space falling on it. That's not counting the manmade stuff that's out there circling around waiting for its time to return to earth.
Space isn't empty, it's just drawn that way.
KFG
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 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?
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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
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
One would HOPE that
that posters have a vague familiarity with the UN before launching such a broadside.
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
If that were true then Battlestar Gallactica wouldn't make any sense at all.
KFG
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.
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
Sound like a good way to add to the problem.
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?
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)
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
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.
"How could a group of utterly clueless politicians do anything useful about space junk?"
One politician can absorb quite a lot of kinetic energy...
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
Getting a heavy object to sink, and yet still stay bouyant enough to surface is a whole hell of a lot less an engineering challenge than getting a big-ass and extremely robust space vehicle to 200-500 miles ASL. You'll notice that an old Los Angeles class attack submarine, with VERY heavy nuclear power plant ran about $600 million in 1970's dollars, and yet the Shuttle runs about $2-$2.5 billion in 1980's dollars. Hell, even the new Virginia class submarine only costs $2billion in fy2000 dollars and it weighs a LOT more than the Shuttle's 100 someodd tons.
But most submarines don't have to worry about 20,000mph paint flecks and broken satellites flying at them at high speed. The worst external threats they have to worry about are running into ships, other submarines, getting hit with exploding torpedos, and running into terrain.
But that's why we need space elevators. Unfortunately, to have space elevators, we need lightweight chemical/nuclear launchers. And those will ALWAYS be fragile.