9 Ideas For Coping With Space Junk

An anonymous reader writes "The space age has filled Earth's orbit with all manner of space junk, from spent rocket stages to frozen bags of astronaut urine, and the problem keeps getting worse. NASA's orbital debris experts estimate that there are currently about 19,000 pieces of space junk that are larger than 10 centimeters, and about 500,000 slightly smaller objects. Researchers and space companies are plotting ways to clean up the mess, and a new photo gallery from Discover Magazine highlights some of the proposals. They range from the cool & doable, like equipping every satellite with a high-tech kite tail for deployment once the satellite is defunct, to the cool & unlikely, like lasers in space."

Comments

The perfect solution has already been worked out

[TrentTheThief]

This is the solution:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_1

Lasers...

[Joce640k]

This guy built a laser which tracks mosquitoes in a room and zaps them. Surely the technology can be adapted...

Re:Lasers...

[BJ_Covert_Action]

You know, I always wanted to talk to that guy for the exact reason you posted. I thought it would be a great university project for some aerospace engineering students to team up with this guy and build a small satellite (~500 kg) that used some combination of high-load capacitors, trickle charge electronics, solar cells, and his laser-tracking technology to basically float around Earth for awhile in a particularly polluted altitude band and just try zapping what ~10 cm pieces of space junk they could find. It would be a great effort for the students, and would act as a wonderful proof-of-concept demonstrator to the big players in the space industry.

Re:Hit or Miss

[BJ_Covert_Action]

That Discovery article was a total waste of time. It really had little to do with "9 ways of dealing with space junk," and was more along the lines of "9 things that are kind of related that we want to talk about." As you mentioned, a couple of its nine methods of dealing with space junk could really just be grouped into the general theme of, stop putting more up there (deorbit your crap at end of mission). There were only three methods that actually discussed getting rid of existing junk: lasers in space, balls of aerogel to capture stuff, blowing up large chunks of junk. For what it's worth, the exploding method that you mentioned discussed only conducitng such methods at low altitudes which actually does work really well. However, it still leaves a lot of unaddressed crud in the higher LEO bands (like the one the ISS is in). The aerogel glob discussion was also an interesting one, but as the article addressed, aerogel can only really handle tiny stuff like paint chips. The lasers in space is probably the most effective solution, but costs so much in terms of energy generation that it is still a ways off in any large scale deployment.

So what else did the article discuss? Well it mentioned the Kessler effect, which has nothing to do with dealing with space junk, but is just a model used to describe space junk. It mentioned that NASA is now putting more efforts into tracking space junk. This is important, of course, but doesn't qualify as a method for removing it or handling it (excepting the very indirect means of simply avoiding it). Then it talks about shielding spacecraft from space junk. This, of course, is necessary and current practice, but no amount of shielding (presently) will protect you from detached thermal blankets or burnt out Delta stages.

All in all, this article just seemed like a disorganized, loosely-themed, terse ramble. I usually expect better from Discover but was severely disappointed in this particular release.