Slashdot Mirror
Giant Balloons Could Solve Space Junk Problem
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."
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.
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.