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Giant Balloons Could Solve Space Junk Problem

Posted by samzenpus on from the giant-balloon-animals-soon-to-come dept.

An anonymous reader writes "More than 100,000 objects bigger than a centimeter wide hover around our planet, accounting for 4 million pounds of junk that befouls our atmosphere and threatens the expensive satellites we actually want in orbit. Dr. Kristen Gates, of Global Aerospace Corporation, proposes that we can clear the skies by attaching a football field-sized balloon to dead satellites, which would increase the orbital drag, eventually bringing a satellite down into the atmosphere where it would burn up. The GOLD — or Gossamer Orbit Lowering Device — unit is easily inflated in space, and best of all, if the deployed GOLD balloon collides with space junk, it won't deflate or break the junk into smaller, less manageable bits."

5 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Re:pop! by h4rr4r · · Score: 4, Interesting

    With no pressure on the outside of the balloon it would deflate very slowly. This is doubly so because it does not take much gas to inflate a balloon in space due to the lack of outside pressure.

  2. Re:pop! by teeks99 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Also they have developed materials that, once inflated in the vacuum of space, can hold their shape without any internal pressure.

  3. Or easier ... by w0mprat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why not simply magnetize the dead satellite or include a small permanent magnet? This would create a magnetic sail. The magnetic field around the satellite would slowly trap plasma from the trace of gases and ions in earth orbit, as well as anything leaking from the sat itself. This would inflate the magnetic field lines and expand a kind of mini magnetosphere around the satellite. This would create drag against the earths magnetic field, and outer atmosphere.

    Common permanent magnets can be much stronger than needed for this.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/magnetic_sail

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    1. Re:Or easier ... by thedj_sd · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They are sending up a pretty big permanent magnet to the ISS very soon. It is part of the AMS science experiment http://www.ams02.org/what-is-ams/tecnology/magnet/pmmagnet/ Could we call this a field test ? If the ISS drops out of the sky, i guess we will know.

  4. Re:Yes, but can they make the surface sticky? by ushering05401 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder if you could coat the balloon with a cheap reflective material that would leave residue on debris that impacted the surface. Wouldn't that provide a gradual increase in our tracking ability without costing a whole lot more than the original design?