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Low Earth Orbit Junk Yard Nearly Full
vlado4 writes "The New York Times has up an article on the amount of space junk in Earth Orbit. According to NASA officials, the amount of stuff we've put into LEO is at critical levels. Additionally they have great graphics of the nearly 1000 new pieces resulting from testing the new Chinese anti-satellite weapon, as well as the damage to Hubble's solar array. The litter is now so bad that, even if space-faring nations refrained from further interference, collisions would continue to create more clutter just above our atmosphere. Space debris appear to be a difficult problem to deal with and may hinder future space exploration."
Didn't Arthur C Clarke or Isaac Asimov detail this problem years ago and posit that a space garbage service would have to be setup to collect this stuff?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Wouldn't all that junk eventually form a ring around the equator? IIRC from high school physics, planets do something like that. Then it wouldn't be a ... oh, wait, equatorial launches are easier but would then go through the ring. Gr. Stupid gravity. Always making things difficult for us.
Yea.. global warming.... *looks at thermometer* -5F .. yea, I am melting here due to global warming..
It is of course very easy to point at the Chinese for shattering a satellite into a thousand pieces, but don't forget that the US has their share of stupid mistakes as well.
For example, in 1963 the US Military launched 480 million tiny needles into orbit (project West Ford), to see if they could be used to reflect radio signals.
That did not work well, but the needles remained in orbit for years.
And if scientists would not have been very opposed to it, they probably would have launched even more to see if the idea would work.
Also, it is difficult to say that space is "full" of junk. The LEO area has such a large volume that even hundres of millions of junk particles at a uniform distribution still means they are all many kilometers apart. So what is "full"?
Put a culture in a petri dish, and the population increases exponentially. After a lapse in time, the waste material created by the culture follows suit. At some point in the petri dish, the waste starts killing the culture and the population begins to decrease and eventually die out. This can be charted as a bell curve. We are all in a giant Petri Dish and our waste will eventually kill us.
Hmm...well, why don't we create and send up the equivalent of a 'space' Roomba. Just let it go up there, and vacuum up debris...when full, it returns to the space station up there, where they bag it and shoot it further out into space away from us...?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
>anything it would collide with would also be moving at a comparable speed
Comparable speed but not comparable velocity: if something in polar orbit hits something in equatorial orbit, grief will ensue.
IANARS, but I would think a big (say, square mile) plow would be able to "catastrophically catch" many objects; and anything that had enough kinetic energy to blast through it like a bullet would probably be slowed enough to drop into a decaying orbit. Thoughts?
Makes me think of Planetes...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I've sometimes mused about a big hunk of aerogel in orbit. I suspect that you don't really need to catch or stop things, just slow them down. If these pieces of junk could just be persuaded to drop perigee down into the 100 mile range, then atmospheric decay would help out.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It's the old "Space is BIG!" problem. But the nearly meaningful adder to the aerogel idea would be to station some blocks of it ahead of and behind valuable things, notably the ISS. (If you stationed any around the HST, you'd also want to be able to move it when you wanted to look in that direction. Even this idea still has trouble with the "Space is BIG!" problem, but at least you're trying to protect a smaller space. Obviously it would be necessary to form the aerogel on-orbit, presuming that's possible.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Now for different organizations "full" is going be defined with different probabilities. If you have as much money as the DOD, for example, "full" might be somewhere north of 50%, but I can't see many for profit companies putting up with a 50% satellite failure rate. For them, "full" probably is south of 10%.
Microwave emitters can be used to setup standing waves around orbiting objects and induce deceleration. The idea has been tested and was originally proposed to harvest ore from asteroid fields. In this setup ,however, a series of earth transmitters would use phase coherance to modulate the location of a standing wave to within the known location of a piece of junk. By moving the standing wave just a little behind the object the object will decelerate to try to stay within the trough. It would eventually burn up. The beauty of this idea is that transmission power can be very low for each of the transmitters but the cumulative signal at the calculated point is enormous. The stronger the signal at point x, the greater the force that could be applied. The zone of the standing wave would be the wave length of the transmission frequency therefore by using low frequency signals one could move relatively large objects(half meter, ect). There you go humanity, don't say I never gave you anything. And for those that want to say my mumbo jumbo is foobar, the original idea was proposed by nasa....ok, the diaper lady sorta ruined that street cred but....