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Using Lasers and Water Guns To Clean Space Debris
WSJdpatton writes "The collision between two satellites last month has renewed interest in some ideas for cleaning up the cloud of debris circling the earth. Some of the plans being considered: Using aging rockets loaded with water to dislodge the debris from orbit so it will burn up in the atmosphere; junk-zapping lasers; and garbage-collecting rockets."
Poor Jim.
The images remind me of Wall-E.
That's not a good thing.
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Wouldn't it be extremely expensive to send large quantities of water into orbit (also, our water supply is limited we can't be throwing it into space!)?
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Since space is a "near" vacuum wouldn't the water flash to steam instantly and be useless?
Sharks can fly to space?
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I've not read TFA yet as I'm just on my way out the door but...
We are already approaching a world wide water shortage are we not? What possible good could come of firing water into space? Even the dirty stuff needs to stay on the planet, as it will never be replaced once it's gone.
-hps
I hope it's done safely and wisely, but it desperately needs to be done. BTW, the image in the article looks like the kml feed from STRATCOM reported in /. back in Sept 08.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/05/1231228
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Of course, you'll need real hardware to go with that.
Ok, jokes apart now hehe.
Someone writes on slashdot days ago about the interesting idea of put a "shield" on space made with a plastic soft container, for example a large plastic bag. fills then with water, the water frozens and you get a good ice shield to put on path of debris. once the shield caugth the debris then can send back to Earth on a planned reentry or ejected to deep space
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
But aren't all of those 'solutions' already considered?
Space garbage zapping: You'll end up with particles and debris that is smaller and more difficult to track. Given a speck of paint in space has the same effect as a bullet on earth I don't know if we really want that.
Space garbage collecting: However you try to do it, your spacecraft would have to either maneuver very very well in order not to be destroyed itself (making even more debris) or have such heavy shields that would make it nigh impossible to get into space.
Space pushing into the atmosphere: Just like garbage collecting, your spacecraft will have to be careful. On the other hand it would also be possible that with a slight miscalculation you push it into an orbit that's either much more dangerous (if it bounces instead of incinerates) or more difficult to track and clean up. Next to that some things might just give other side effects here on earth. What do you think would happen if you push an old satellite with some type of nuclear fuel into the atmosphere and it doesn't burn up completely the way you want it to and it basically becomes a dirty bomb in high orbit.
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Potable water is mostly at its limits in many areas of the world because of politics, science has had the answer for along time and there has been ample money available, where it is allowed.
Plus politics is a great way of creating shortages where none existed. I live the perfect example of this, where it was decided years ago in some Federal Court that some mussels and some barges needed the water more than humans for who the damn was created form decades ago.
I won't even get into how much people waste in the states watering their lawns, I swear some of my neighbors could fill a pool a week.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Watch Thursdays at 8 for the wacky antics and hijinks of a hilarious team of orbiting garbage collectors as they circle the planet collecting debris and aiming it at ex-Spouses, in-laws etc... back on Earth.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Not only would lofting water into space be a colossal waste of energy and water, it would only exacerbate the problem!
IMHO the only 'clean' way to deorbit debris is to add energy to the debris in the retrograde direction without using additional mass, which means photons. Laser pulses could do it either by radiation pressure directly (huge laser), or by pulses that ablate the debris slightly (creates tiny beads of additional debris).
Electron/proton beams would work as well, as would alpha particles, but they'd pose a risk to humans in space. In fact, using charged particles might induce a charge on the debris that would then help direct the debris toward it's doom (debris vector, Earth's magnetic field, right hand rule....whatever).
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I am not rocket scientist but I am curious about this one:
"The laser would only singe the surface of an object in space, but that tiny burn could still help point it downward, Dr. Campbell says"
How does one singe and object from below and expect the resultant force on the object to move it down? I would expect you would get off-gassing from the burnt bottom side which would nudge it higher. If the object was rotating (which I'm sure close to 100% of them are) you would end up with an unpredictable resultant force on the object. On the surface it seems to me that the laser technique would at best produce a pseudo random result and at worst push the object higher.
I'm sure it is being thought through by minds much more experienced in such things than mine... just makes me curious how that works.
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
Wow. Just, wow.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
One cubic foot of water is around 60 lbs. The is $600,000 per cubic foot of water. Not very cost effective. And my numbers are old and off the cuff. It could be far more expensive now.
Seems like a bad idea.
What a bunch of MO...RONS!
I did a calculation once upon a time when I designed a 300 man space base, lofting the water alone would cost Billions of $ per year, assuming a Space Shuttle model launch cost. Far cheaper to loft energy from ground based mechanisms to combat space clutter. If the space gun aka John Hunter concept was still alive, we could send up ice less expensively in that manner ala Jules Verne. Ground based LASERS are impractical at this stage of their development, which leaves ground based kinetic projectiles as the sole cost effective, short term solution to the problem.
Out of interest, what would the consequences be if we used Nuclear weapons in an attempt to get rid of the space junk? Would it just create more debris?
http://datacore.sciflicks.com/spaceballs/images/spaceballs_large_15.jpg
I won't even get into how much people waste in the states watering their lawns, I swear some of my neighbors could fill a pool a week.
You must live in a good neighbourhood. Some of my neighbours could fill a pool a week with their empty beer cans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
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To be clear, they are not talking about blowin' up space junk with lasers. The laser will instead slow down small pieces of space debris so that their orbits deteriorate. (Blowing things up is the domain of the other Project Orion.)
This mechanism is called a laser broom, and there is a short entry about it on Wikipedia. I can't seem to find a more detailed, technical description of how this process works.
Eventually we will have that solar shield that the repair-global-warming crowd keeps raving about.
With jet packs and leaf blowers - you cant go wrong!
These are all very nice ideas, but first they'd have to develop spacesuits for the sharks.
Which puts us one step closer to landsharks.
I remember back almost 20 years ago when I was a high school freshman, our english teacher gave us this paper.
Within a big rectangle, we could write or draw anything we wanted.
The papers were then going to be scanned and put into some condensed format... some kind of tape or disk I guess.
Then our scanned work was going to be flown to space. I don't recall why... or where. Probably just piggybacking on some satellite launch?
But I do remember that I was a smart ass... and drew a picture of Earth with huge clouds of satellites and garbage cans and garbage bags orbiting it. It was my little protest to sending our stupid drawings up to space.
Man I wish I could see that picture again. I'm getting all nostalgic just thinking about it.
Call Adam Quark.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I just saw an email response of this story from a physicist at NASA that specializes in space debris. Their response was that throwing water into space would just cause more space debris as ice.
So, don't get too excited about the water idea.
I recommend watching the Backyardigans GarbageTrek episode. Some pretty funky music too.
Salut,
Jacques
Oh wow . . . imaging having that game on-line. 1. Create a mobile base with a laser in space 2. Sell tickets on-line to shoot space debris for 5min 3. ?? 4. Profit!
If aerogels can be made in space (without the need for the heavy supercritical fluid needed to make it on earth or if there is some way to recycle the fluid) you could cheaply launch very large volumes of a substance that would have the ability to absorb momentum from colliding objects. This would either result in the object being embedded in the aerogel (if it was small relative to the aerogel) or the object would punch through it but still end up being decelerated (if the object was large but still small enough not to destroy the aerogel).
This is of course the material that was used in NASA's stardust mission which picked up cometary material while passing by it at a very high relative velocity. (25,000+ mph?). The (tiny) cometary particles became embedded in the aerogel.
If you can scale this up substantially you should be able to capture or at least decelerate much larger objects. Of course this means your aerogel would have to be very large and thick but since it is the lightest material known to man the launch costs would be very low IF YOU COULD MAKE IT IN ORBIT. Having a very large piece of aerogel also increases its cross section which is very desirable because you'll eventually want to basically sweep up ALL the objects in earth orbit that can cause harm (like paint chips, etc.) and not just the ones that are large enough to be tracked.
I believe aerogels are used for micrometeoroid protection on the ISS.
An interesting question (assuming this worked) would be; if there were semi-random impacts on a large orbiting "sponge" as it were would this cause the sponge itself to de-orbit? (Of courses you could periodically reboost it). Or would the impacts from all directions cancel each other out? I say "semi-random" because even the debris from orbital collisions probably have some "bias" in their motion, for example most satellites were launched towards the east to gain angular momentum from the earth's spin.
Where's Roger Wilco when you need him...
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Couldn't he just sling some webs?
It was very costly to put all that mass up there - it should be collected and eventually recycled in orbit. Basic physics.
Remember Max Headroom in the late 80's when they had their annual sky clearance holiday? They brought out these big lasers that they used to zap all of the debris out of orbit and everyone partied like Marti Gras.
A cosmic game of pool for space nerds is in order, bonus points for taking down opposing spy satellites...
else put more junk in orbit to save us from asteroid impacts :-)
The economics of this plan are kinda awful.
For instance, sending water into space is mighty hard on the wallet. Figure on about $8,000 per pound to send it into a retrograde orbit. And you'd need to send up, oh, let's say a trillion pounds to seed the orbits with a 0.0000001% density of ice. About 10^11 cubic kilometers, 10^26 cc's, 10^18 grams, 10^ 15 kilos, 2.2x10^15 pounds, 1.8x10^19 dollars. That's a 18 billion billion dollars.
And using lasers is no picnic either. You'd want to deliver many kilowatts per square centimeter, which isn't going to be feasible from the ground. Normal atmospheric refraction over the long distance (you have to shoot at the approaching edge of the object, low in the west), that's going to wiggle and disperse the beam by many miles, that's even assuming one could ever develop a radar with the required accuracy (not likely).
Last time I checked water was a greenhouse gas, as such it seems awfully silly to talk constantly about global warming and then blast a bunch of water into the upper reaches of the atmosphere(all earth orbits are still in atmosphere, just really really thin atmosphere).
It may be that the amount of water they're talking about is entirely too small to change much, but if they actually want to clear all the debris up they're going to need a lot of water.
Of course, whether that's an issue or not really depends on whether you believe in global warming.
The proposed Orion space debris laser fits nicely with our recent problems of creating so much debris in LEO. It would be a single pulsed laser on an equatorial mountaintop capable of ridding LEO of hazards in 4 years.
With the recent collisions this is becoming imperative. We need to have a clean LEO environment or we aren't going to do much in space.
http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/orions_laser_hunting_space_debris.shtml
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1997SPIE.3092..728P
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_broom
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=3109525
Water makes a great shield inside a space station but is a dumb idea for "collecting" debris.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
They might have mass but I think you miss the point. Debris in orbit presents a hazard to spacecraft. A small paint chip left a small crater in the windshield of the space shuttle. Debris can be as small as a paint chip but its mass is enormous compared to subatomic particles. The mass of subatomic particles is just not big enough to present a collision hazard to spacecraft. Enough of them might cause additional drag which might cause their orbits to degrade prematurely. Note: I am not talking about the solar wind or cosmic radiation.
Do we not have a space station up there, might it not need extra parts of wires or glass or metal, could we not recycle by going to get them using a shuttle and bringing them back to the station to reuse the parts, or even have a smelt up there where we could burn up the metal to create new shapes needed for repairs...etc.
Come on people...let's get with the program...recycling is good and will waste a lot less money creating lasers or water guns or robotic garbage collectors!!!
I really hope NASA and the like are reading this, they need better management!
This is roughly akin to mentioning "24" in any article on Slashdot about terrorism.
Please help metamoderate.
Andy Griffith is way too old to be heading out into space again!
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In the book Sam Gunn, Unlimited by Ben Bova the title character devised a system to do this. Actually he devised a system to push debris from the path of a satellite. Everything in orbit should pick up the same electrical charge from passing through the Earths magnetic field. By mounting a (insert large device here) on the leading edge/face of a satellite with the same charge, objects will be pushed out of the path of the satellite. To collect the garbage you need only reverse the charge, and use some type of foam to capture the debris, then deorbit when full or, as previously mentioned, recycle in orbit.
Why wasn't it blindingly obvious to the proposer of this scheme that you can't clear space debris by sending more up there?
(it sounds like the sort of daft logic that unscrupulous financiers use to persuade the gullible that you can clear your debts by consolidating your loans - duh!)
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Why not build something like an orbital Roomba... maybe with a large magnetic attachment that will grab stuff.
Seems a lot better than a laser. Then you just have to collect the Space Roomba empty it out and send it off again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA_OXKXSR04
I think a design like the whale shark (obviously not to scale...well maybe how big is the junk?)
Just have it float around and filter in bits of debris.
A giant whale shark space roomba... now that would be awesome..
-- With fricken laser beams! best of both worlds!
Seriously, the image of something moving fast until you hit it with a cold beam or a bucket of cold water and then it STOPS dead in its tracks is cartoon physics.
What is spraying water at satellites going to do to them? Nothing at all. That's because cartoon physics was invented by cartoon artists. Duh.
God damn I hate it when English majors try to do physics. It's almost as bad as when Journalists try to write Perl code, or when an Art History major tries to write a fast-paced book about computer hacking. Before you know it, you've got a kid hacking the space shuttle with an empty USB drive enclosure.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Just like shooting space junk it can also shoot non-junk. We would then be starting an arms race. although, I believe China, Russia and even the USA's NIF are already working towards this direction.
Something doesn't seem to add up. They've already indicated that slight modifications to trajectories can deteriorate an orbit, so some portion of the space junk caused by collisions must fail to remain in orbit. But they also say that collisions cause more junk, which causes more collisions, as though this were a never-ending cycle of feedback.
It seems as though there must be a threshold somewhere where the introduction of further space junk removes from orbit, on average, an equal amount of debris as it introduces. The farther past this threshold, the more likely that introducing debris will remove more than is introduced. There must be a point of equilibrium.
Take the following exaggerated scenario, for example. Let's say that by chance or plan, there is debris in orbit within every cubic meter at stable altitudes. (I am not a physicist, but this seems highly improbable statistically.) The introduction of a meteoroid through this debris field would almost certainly cause a significant chain-reaction with many affected objects acquiring unstable orbits leading to failure.
Not-to-scale pictures aside, I doubt we're anywhere near such a threshold -- even if we are reaching a point where our ability to avoid debris is insufficient to mitigate the danger. But surely it would be at least interesting, if not practically useful, to know this "saturation" point.
Or perhaps this is already known, and I am just unaware.
They put up lots of little moons to keep their space junk all in a single plane.
With the earth warming up there will be less of a need for snow plows.
I won't even get into how much people waste in the states watering their lawns, I swear some of my neighbors could fill a pool a week.
Are all plants a waste, or just the fast growing ones? (it is a rhetorical Q, but I don't know a answer) My grass (6' by 50') I planted because without it I would have to funnel all the water from the roof to the sewer (also adding gutters is forbidden by home owners), for treatment. Since the grass filters it, disperses it, and prevent erosion, I just have enough to do that (but still needs watered) Regardless I think the grass provides enough benefit (except in really arid places, or low density population where the pollution cleaning benefits are not so great) to be much better than any open water (IE pools, waste water treatment, fish ponds, etc, etc)
Granted agave is popular in Europe and is mostly a better erosion solution, except then my dog cant use that area, and the snakes, scorpions, spiders that I don't want next to my house seam to build into that tighter.
I have added a rain barrel, a couple more (back of the house can have gutters, just not the front) and I may be able to not have to pump water from the ground for watering, is that still a waste? (I assume not much difference, less electric to pump it up, but assuming a mostly local water cycle that's about it)
Silly people. Why try to shoot down a zillion pieces of junk when you just have to move one large thing away from said junk. 1/2 gee acceleration (bad things happen if you go higher than one gee to those on the trailing surface) for a couple hours should do the trick.
We spent hundreds of hours in front of the Astroids simulator, practicing breaking rocks up into smaller rocks!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
*sigh*
What about launching an expanding foam/gel to create a large block of "debris catcher", say the size of a half-football field. The concept is similar to what bow hunters use to practice on, and in indoor shooting ranges. Launch a canister into a trajectory to intercept a swath of debris, deploy foam/gel, absorb the impact and embed the debris. Ensure that the trajectory will either take the debris out of earth orbit or fall back into the atmosphere over an ocean. At the very least, you get a large block that could be pushed back into the atmosphere later in a future mission...
Hrm, maybe that could be a way to capture satellites, as well. Launch a big foam deployment capsule that engulfs/envelopes a satellite with enough mass to pull it from orbit, then recover the remains on the ground for examination...
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Why don't we get illegal immigrants to do it?
Actually, it is likely that a lot of the water will come back to earth. In a LARGE number of years.
Most of it will come back immediately. The water spray itself, aimed to transfer momentum to the debris in order to deorbit it, should itself be in an atmosphere-intersecting trajectory. The bulk will miss and end up in the atmosphere.
What gets blasted into steam will still be deep in the gravity well. Most of it will be perturbed into denser atmosphere in reasonably short order. (Remember: The atmosphere doesn't "end". It peters out gradually until it merges with the solar wind out at the magnetosphere shock front.) Some will be ionized and the hydrogen will tend to blow away, leaving hydroxyl radicals and monatomic oxyygen - much like what naturally happens in the upper atmosphere already.
You WILL see an increase in upper atmosphere water and noctilucent clouds. But we're probably not talking enough water to have any other significant environmental impact. (Better use deionized water, though. Any chlorine would be a real issue for the ozone. I'm normally a debunker of ozone-hole hand-wringing but this could be significant.)
As to "running out of water": Think of the size of the oceans. We're talking a VERY small drop from a VERY big bucket.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Send up seawater.
Distill, reverse-osmosis, or otherwise purify it first.
I'm normally one to debunk hand-wringing about the ozone layer. But most of the sprayed water will miss the debris and impact the upper atmosphere immediately (while the rest comes down slowly over many years). If you use unpurified sea water you'll put a LOT of chlorine ions from sea salt into the ozone layer - near the equator where it's a big deal - and chlorine is the catalyst for the ozone->oxygen transition that got freon banned.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
You're probably wondering why we didn't just use guitars and laser guns to clean space. Well...
Crap! Why didn't we use guitars and laser guns??!!
Go! Blastoise I choose you! HYDRO PUMP!!!!!11!!!
Isn't space so cold that the water would become ice?
Have the space shuttle zap it.
We don't need less debris. We need more debris! Only then we will get an equilibrium (see rings of Saturn). After that it's just a matter of giving every satellite an auxiliary moon for sweeping up the debris.
I donâ(TM)t see the logic of blasting space junk with lasers unless it completely vaporizes the junk. If the junk is broken into smaller pieces (with less mass) the chances of it staying in orbit increases. What is needed is to clump this material into a great mass unit so it will fall back to earth and incinerate in the atmosphere.
I'd design a multi-celled balloon made of impact resistant film, self-inflatable, and attached to a de-orbiting mechanism.
Small space junk should decelerate enough from impacting this balloon. And once all the cells of this balloon have been popped, the de-orbiting mechanism brings it back down.
Since it doesnt take a lot of gas to inflate a balloon in space, it would weigh a lot less and take less room in rockets than other solutions, and since it would be relatively low-tech, it would probably be cheaper too.
We have seen it all.
That bubble gum can stick all these together, and they will fall into earth and burn.
Check it out, do not waste water.
Just give some astronauts a whole lot of iced tea to drink, in those little bubble pouches, then fly them in a slightly higher orbit, and let them have contests to knock the debris out of orbit!
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
why not recycle in place? Send up a robotic recycling station to create parts for the ISS.
Saturns rings would like a word with you. ;)
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
Space Roomba at your service.
So how about tiny satellites that use solar sails to coral junk over time. They could be networked and radar-equipped to avoid each other and real satellites(maybe fitted with transponders for redundancy). These satellites could be very small and the sails small as well. If there was a satellite in distress or a piece of junk to big for one of these micro guys they could gang up and help each other.
I know technically there are hurdles with solar sail technology but even worse are the political and financial hurdles. Also technically we would need to figure out a safe way to push debris or connect to legit, usable satellites without damaging equipment. For trash just a plow-like shape would work but maybe an electromagnet would work also.
First, who funds/runs this program? Even if these satellites were semi-autonomous there would be enough management needed to double what NASA has(a guess on my part) as well as coordinating with the world's satellite owners to maintain their orbits. Then, how do we convince people that these satellites need to be programmed open source to ensure they are politics-neutral.
If we as citizens of Earth can unite around the idea of space as our global park then we also need to create a neutral organization that will keep it clean.