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Satellite Collision Debris May Hamper Space Launch
Matt_dk writes "The debris from a recent collision involving two communications satellites could pose a serious threat for future launches of spacecraft into a geostationary orbit, a Russian scientist said on Friday. Future launches will have to be adjusted with regard to the fact that the debris [from the collision] has spread over an 800-km area and will gather at a common orbit in 5-6 years."
Well, though you might not have thought such a thing was necessary or useful per se' I'm here to tell you that a laser based in orbit than can be used to vaporize such debris is a laser worth having. Oh well
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Unfortunately, this is not Star Trek, where we can just point some magical energy beam at something and "vaporize" it, rendering it harmless. We have to deal with Real Physics here, especially energy constraints. How much energy does do you think it takes to boil a few hundred kilograms of iron? Do you think we have anything remotely like that which we could feasibly launch into orbit? What do you think happens when it inevitably cools?
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How much energy does do you think it takes to boil a few hundred kilograms of iron?
Nothing a sufficiently large matter/anti-matter reaction couldn't generate, provided you have enough dilithium to safely regulate the reaction.
It isn't that hard, people! We had this stuff 50 years ago on Star Trek.
to get into geostationary you have to pass the 300 mile mark. If you were to hit anything on the way.. bad stuff!
Vaporizing the crap is not feasible, nor is putting extremely large lasers in orbit. Fortunately, neither is necessary. You build a very high peak-power pulse laser on the ground and use it to hit the bits of debris with femtosecond pulses that vaporize a few micrograms off each of them. The vapor acts like a rocket engine, its reaction force slightly changing the orbit. Hit each bit again every time it comes around and soon it is in a decaying orbit. Space Broom
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> I thought the collision was at like 300mi altitude. Now they'r saying this causes
> problems at Geosynchronous orbit?
> What am I missing?
The fact that in order to get from here to there one must cross the intervening space.
> I thought GEO was at like 30,000 miles above the earth.
Closer to 22,000.
> I didn't think the shuttle planned on traveling that high anyway.
Some of the wreckage was scattered into orbits that could intersect that of the Shuttle while it is on its way to Hubble.
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All you have to do is use a Higgs reactor as the power source - use a fusion reaction as a primary energy source to drive ablation plates within an inertial confinement field that then compresses yttrium arsenide into a Grand Unified Theory quark-gluon plasma, and store the radiative energy from the breaking of the supersymmetry during the cooling process in superconducting inductors. God, why do I have to spell things out for everyone.
Then again, if you have antimatter, why not just send it at the debris?
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Precisely. If this is a problem for geo launches, then the same likely applies to future interplanetary launches (Lunar missions, Mars landers, etc.) as well.
Of course, what we really need is a simple deflector shield to protect our ships . . .
Sharks can't fly, though, and they would have to be smart enough to aim taking into account the refractive index difference between the seawater and the air.
Maybe if we used flying fish with frickin' lasers strapped to their heads...
Furthermore, sharks can't live in space - duh.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Because it would tear away our stratosphere on the way up, you insensitive clod. Why don't you just go side with the debris if that's how you want to roll? Some of us are trying to save a planet here!
All the cool planets sort their space debris into convenient rings using the gravitational pulls of small moons. We just need to invest in placing a few in low orbits and they will quickly destabilize anything in orbits not resonant with their own.
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if you blast it from down here, you're bound to hit something that points towards the earth. That means the materials vaporized will be pushed towards earth, giving whatever you're shooting at a boost towards a higher orbit.
It doesn't work like that. A push directly away from the Earth will not give a 'higher' orbit (one with more angular momentum), it will change the shape of the orbit (the eccentricity). Essentially the orbit will become longer and thinner, and at a different point in the orbit it will be lower and start to brush against the atmosphere, thus invoking atmospheric drag.