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Space Junk Getting Worse
HockeyPuck writes "According to Space.com the amount of space junk is getting worse. 'A head-on collision was averted between a spent upper stage from a Chinese rocket and the European Space Agency's (ESA) huge Envisat Earth remote-sensing spacecraft. [...] But what if the two objects had tangled? Such a space collision would have caused mayhem in the heavens, adding clutter to an orbit altitude where there are big problems already, said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the European Space Agency's Space Debris Office in Darmstadt, Germany."
I think they normally push them into an orbit that will degrade so that they'll burn up on reentry. That takes less energy than putting them on a trajectory that leaves Earth's orbit.
The real problem is junk that doesn't have working thrusters and communications so that they can tell it to de-orbit.
When you abandon satellite, fuel tanks or anything else in the space, why not just push it floating further away in space? Let some aliens take care of them.
It takes energy to send a satellite up into a higher orbit, and even more to push it out of Earth orbit entirely...
For that matter it also takes energy to shift a satellite to a lower orbit, too. About the only thing you get for free is atmospheric drag, and then only once your satellite is already low enough to run into the upper atmosphere.
To give a satellite the ability to do any of these things, it must carry its own rocket motors and fuel - this increases the satellite's launch-weight, which in turn increases the fuel requirements of the booster.
Bow-ties are cool.
Sounds like it is time an outerspace garbage man.
Where can I apply for that job?
I hear Technora Corp is putting together some kind of department for this...
Bow-ties are cool.
Could we just continue this trend and call it a shield against alien invasions? I for one welcome the trash shield.
I wonder why this issue hasn't been fixed by now.
I can come up with quite a few ways that we could remove space junk, most aren't very good, but there is one I think would work the best.
Launch a couple satellites with solid state lasers. Heat up the side of the space junk facing earth and let the laser push it into the atmosphere.
Plus if you have a few dozen up there you could perhaps deflect larger objects, yet they would be useless if you wanted to shoot a target on the surface of the Earth.
There has to be a reason that there has been next to no attempt to control the space junk issue, I guess getting funding to clean up orbits is hard to come by.
There will be no concerted effort to remove space junk until the risk of collision with space junk rises to the point that it costs less to remove the junk than to risk being hit by it.
It could be that this is some important idea in physics I simply don't understand... But how does a laser push an object into the atmosphere? What good does heating up one side of it do? How powerful of a laser do you need to significantly alter the trajectory of a piece of space debris? And how do you heat up one side of it if the object is spinning? (Which it almost surely is...) What happens if the laser misses? And if the object you're shooting at doesn't give off a diffuse reflection, how do you know if you hit or missed?
Bow-ties are cool.
So why don't they just use it and clean up?
If something weighs 3 tons and is in orbit, someone should be able to take it up to the space station, bolt it down, and start wielding the holes shut.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
That wouldn't take much fuel or anything...
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_junk)
Launch a couple satellites with solid state lasers. Heat up the side of the space junk facing earth and let the laser push it into the atmosphere.
Plus if you have a few dozen up there you could perhaps deflect larger objects, yet they would be useless if you wanted to shoot a target on the surface of the Earth.
There has to be a reason that there has been next to no attempt to control the space junk issue, I guess getting funding to clean up orbits is hard to come by.
How are you going to "push" objects that cross your orbit with 10 km/s?
They have some solutions on wikipedia:
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Stop idiots from blasting satellites in space an creating even more debris. Stop other idiots from giving the first group of idiots a reason to blow up satellites.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
These days, for the most part, we do that. Launch trajectories are planned with CCAM (collision and contamination avoidance maneuvers) deorbit profiles or extended orbital profiles. That is to say, spent rocket stages and such tend to be rocketed into escape orbits or back into the atmosphere to breakup. Satellites are a bit harder to do this with, as, sometimes they end up using a bit more fuel than planned and, as such, may not be able to thrust into a proper disposal method. Of course, this is also regulated now so most (if not all) modern missions are required to take this excess fuel margin into account when being designed.
Really, the big problem with the current space junk comes from orbital bodies that are decades old. Before things were regulated heavily in orbital operations, many satellite were just left to decay and breakup in orbit. As a result, we have a lot of detached thermal blankets and other clutter drifting around up there. There is also a large contribution that comes from nations which do not follow modern disposal regulations. The article mentions that China is one of these nations. There are others (such as Iran) but they are not contributing a whole lot because many space programs are still small.
When it comes down to it, spacecraft disposal is a responsibility just like terrestrial recycling. The responsible thing to do is pay more and dispose of things correctly. Unfortunately, we didn't plan ahead from the get go and some people just prefer cutting corners.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Exactly, so we should build a gigantic ground based laser that can vaporize a school bus sized object in 1/4 a second. I want the beam to be 30 feet wide and blackout every city in a hemisphere when it fires. Heck make it powerful enough that it adjusts the earth's orbit due to the amount of photos being fired.
Plus we can use it when the aliens get here all pissed off that we are cluttering up the lower EM spectrum with a lot of useless chatter.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
We do exactly that. We let them burn up in the atmosphere, or crash into the ocean. The parts then get dissolved in the rain, or in the ocean water. The dissolved little bits get laid down on the ocean floor and riverbeds as mineral deposits. These mineral deposits get mined. The ore gets refined. New parts are designed, and voila, a few million years from now you get a shiny new starboard reticle articulation trunion. Why, the very reticle articulation trunions used on the shuttle Discovery were once part of a Jurasic era weather monitoring satellite.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
We should start sending all our garbage there.
I agree, but how will we convince all 535 members of Congress to get on the space ship?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
A group of "industry scientists" has, they claim, shown conclusively that there is no "space junk problem". Moreover, they have shown that even if there is a problem, it is not man-made but is instead, due to natural changes that are cyclical in nature.
Not sure how serious you're being, but a laser could be used without needing to vaporize the entire object. A laser broom works by vaporizing just a small part of the object to create thrust and knock the object out of orbit.
The laser broom is intended to be used at high enough power to punch through the atmosphere with enough remaining power to ablate material from the debris for several minutes. This would provide thrust to alter its orbit, dropping the perigee into the upper atmosphere, increasing drag so that the debris would eventually burn up on reentry.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Can we please never hear this idea ever again? Every time a hard waste disposal problem comes up, someone suggests throwing the nuclear waste, or decaying space debris into the sun.
Throwing something into the sun would require a truly staggering amount of energy. It will never be a practical means of waste disposal.
Actually, a rocket motor and fuel is not required. A cheap, easy, and--I hate to use this word, but--"free" form of orbital propulsion exists. Electrodynamic tether propulsion. Extend a conducting wire out from the spacecraft, and as it moves through the Earth's magnetic field, it can act as a motor or a brake like a normal electric motor. No fuel required.
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Correct me if I'm wrong (and I probably am) but don't you GAIN speed as you fall into the sun's gravity well?
Yes, and if we could just set the space junk in space with no momentum, the sun's gravity would be all we need.
But any space junk launched from earth is starting with a solar orbital velocity of ~30km/s. Redirecting a rocket from that orbit into one that intersects the sun takes a lot of energy.
The enemies of Democracy are
I suggest we create a fleet of Ark ships. Elected officials get on Ark Ship #2.
Brett
You're already in the sun's gravity well. And every little bit of matter in your body has been happily falling into the sun for 5 billion years.
Orbiting is very much like flying in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: it's the art of falling towards a celestial body with enough speed that you miss it every time. You want to hit the sun? You've got to slow yourself down by about 60,000mph, otherwise you're just going to keep missing it every time.
It's only slightly harder to fling yourself out of the solar system than it is to hit the sun and we've only managed that five times, I think.