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NASA Wants To Zap Space Junk With Lasers
Hugh Pickens writes "MIT Technology Review reports that various ideas have been floated for removing space junk, most of them hugely expensive, but now James Mason at NASA Ames Research Center has come up with the much cheaper option of zapping individual pieces of junk with a ground-based laser, to slow them down so that they eventually de-orbit. Mason estimates that a device to test the reversal of the Kessler syndrome could be put together for a million dollars, which would have to be shared by many space-faring nations, to avoid the inevitable legal issues that using such a device would raise. 'The scheme requires launching nothing into space — except photons (PDF) — and requires no on-orbit interaction — except photon pressure. It is thus less likely to create additional debris risk in comparison to most debris removal schemes,' writes Mason. 'Eventually the concept may lead to an operational international system for shielding satellites and large debris objects from a majority of collisions as well as providing high accuracy debris tracking data and propellant-less station keeping for smallsats.'"
Ability to blind and de-orbit enemy satellites in wartime.
And, if development of the technology also allows the US to de-orbit other country's satellites that's all to the good. Right?
get the space sharks ready!
Is there any problem they CAN'T fix?
There is no -1 Disagree.
...everyone wants to zap space junk with lasers. NASA just happens to be in a better position than most to get the job done.
I tried, and found a "Lameness filter"
Anybody want my mod points?
Just never knew where we could find the protoculture to power it. Plus, it would come in handy when some pesky ETs show up looking to steal our resources and women!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Not really. TFA says ground-based. Everyone knows there are no land-sharks. Not yet, anyway.
Yeah, it's all fun and games until someone gets him it the head with an old satellite.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Fire photon torpedoes!
Oooh! Can they set up a web interface and charge money for us to shoot them!!!?
Who wants high score??
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. -- Groucho Marx
To avoid legal incidents we will be mounting the lasers in international waters. We will be subsidizing costs by using existing biological life-forms, mainly sharks, as the key base for the laser installation. Aiming the devices will also utilize the shark's keen sense of smell to identify and destroy decaying orbital installations.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. -- Isaac Asimov
And then when the Kzinti invade, we'll just turn the lasers on them! It's a win/win situation, really.
There are some very pricey earth-facing CCDs, behind sophisticated optics, in earth orbit. Be a pity if any of them were to catch fire...
NASA Hopes Laser Broom Will Help Clean Up Space Debris
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/debris-00a.html
Are sharks space worthy?
"To stop the terrorists."
Am I the only one who read this title and immediately thought of Frau Farbissina yelling "Fire the laser"? :)
Pfah, this is an old idea: it's called a laser broom.
NASA was even talking about this a decade ago, though it had a $200M price tag at the time: SpaceDaily article from 2000.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
See the dept tag on the summary.
Am I the only one that got this image of charred feathers fluttering gently to the ground? Sizzle, poof, flutter.
How big is your "junk" that it needs to be zapped while you're in space?
Can just see it now....all these aging NASA guys sitting around a trackball playing Missile Command...but for real. Sign me up!!!
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
(tap tap tap)
"Candygram!"
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Not for... (sticks pinky finger to mouth)... One MILLion dollars!
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
How are they going to get the sharks up there?
And China will tell the US "You touch my junk, and I'll nuke you!"
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Meh. This idea has been bouncing around for a while now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN8YIR60Ij0 Though the application demonstrated in the video was for a slightly different purpose, it would be an additional benefit, should the need arise.
You need to read some books from Walter Moers, a German writer. Then you'll know that a species called "shark maggots" lives on the continent of Zamonia.
Pay big bucks to bag an elephant? Or a rare Antarctica albino bearded clam tiger? Offer folks who have unreasonable amounts of money the opportunity to bag a satellite. It looks great mounted, up on the wall of the Africa room, next to Bambi's head. The profits could go to getting NASA back into action.
We'll aim the laser on the satellite, Sir . . . all you have to do is pull the trigger . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
In reply comments at the bottom of TFA you see they are NOT talking about de-orbiting things this way, only making minute changes in orbit to avoid collisions.
Perhaps preventing collisions allows natural decay to remove debris faster than it accumulates, but other than that, their plan was not about de-orbit of debris.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Lots of smaller, harder to track debris, moving at higher velocities.
Didn't these numbskulls ever play "Asteroids"?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Or worse, getting hit by a re-entering toilet.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Maybe we could just send a couple of Daisy BB guns to the International space station. When the crew gets bored they can go for a space walk and practice space debris skeet shooting.
Don't we have something like this already. Isn't it called StarWars.
Or worse, getting hit by a re-entering toilet.
I do believe that was "Dead Like Me"
Just think of them as Mother Nature's Brazilian wax. Grip 'n' rip.
There's been interesting talk about trying to recycle this on-orbit material, since significant energy costs have been paid to get it up into orbit. Such a scheme would be orders of magnitude more difficult, since you're trying to do more than just roughly reduce the velocity of some object by selectively burning off its +V side, and instead you're trying to corral enough space junk into similar orbits that you can cause clumps to accrete. Presumably, the accretion would involve broader scale application of energy--off the top of my head, I'd say a shitload of directed microwaves, since directing shitloads of microwaves is something we're relatively good at, but there's no analysis behind that.
Exciting times.
Any law that forbids cleaning up space? As there is no international convention about at which height airspace ends and space starts, all should be fine if the country using such a laser only shoots stuff above it's own territory.
They are trying to increase the size of Mr. Spaces junk right? This is what scientists do yes?
8=====D
And China will tell the US "You touch my junk, and I'll nuke you!" ...blast orbiting stuff might also just be powerful enough to shoot down any incoming ICBMs too!
Maybe we could put a big magnet in space and play Katamari Damacy with the space junk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwhFH75OCDs
Are sharks really accurate enough to shoot down orbital debris with a head mounted laser? If they released some piranha into the sharks tank, would that be sufficient to destroy Tokyo (is a thrashing shark with a laser as powerful as Godzilla)?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
The people in my neighborhood have been running scaled down tests of this technology using laser pointers at aircraft for years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_%28TV_series%29
I commented elsewhere on the actual numbers, which show quite clearly that even a 5 kw laser would exert at most completely irrelevant forces on any object large enough to actually see from earth and hence target -- accelerations on a good day of 10s of microns per second per year of radiation pressure. Having RTFA and noted all of the corrections by the authors (of the idea, if I understand things correctly) it is still an enormously stupid idea. What part of piconewton scale forces is difficult to understand?
I give this one as an assignment for my intro physics classes -- suppose you have a megawatt laser with a beam 1 cm^2 across and mount it on the rear of your spaceship to use as a drive. Wow, a whole million watts of power! Surely that will provide the ship with all kinds of thrust!
Sure, if all kinds of thrust is a few micronewtons.
You'd get more thrust -- and probably more net delta-vee for any acceleration time you are willing to wait -- if you simply took the laser to the door of your capsule and threw it, as hard as you can, away.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Will they be shark-mounted?
Furries make the internet go.
Niven... is there anything he can't fix?
Since when should countries give away their technology because of fear of lawyers? OK, this is Slashdot, so I'd better re-word that.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
I think you are thinking of momentum transfered by photons, this heats part of space junk to high temperature, to vaporize. Much better thrust to energy ratio.
I mean... what if my "space debris" is a well calibrated reflective surface...
Does anyone really think we can split or stop metal parts by shining light on them?
I had a guaranteed military sale with ED 209. Renovation program. Spare parts for 25 years. Who cares if it worked or not?
-- Dick Jones, Robocop
Are you kidding? This idea is brilliant. It's an impossible goal that demands huge amounts of funding which the military will find as appealing as crack-soaked catnip served on hookers. It's not a blank check -- it's a limitless credit card that will never get declined. They've been buying this schtick since Reagan. When this idea plays out -- finally, a few decades from now -- we'll just move on to promising them phasers, then blasters and light sabers.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
If the lasers can apply enough energy to cause a very slight (but over time significant) change in orbital velocity I'm wondering if an interconnected worldwide network consisting of dozens of these low-power stations could be used not only to clear unwanted debris from orbit but also to augment the maneuvering capacity and orbital speed of useful satellites, thus potentially extending their lifespan. Measures would of course be taken to insure that atmospheric traffic would remain safe, but if the power is so low that it takes multiple hours of focused exposure to cause a slight change in trajectory, a momentary touch (such as an aircraft inadvertently passing through the beam) might only be dangerous to eyeballs, not the structure of the craft.
Allow any party that owns a satellite and that is potentially interested in altering it's path to invest in the project and in return be granted complete access to information regarding the activities of the network and a proportional measure of control over the system. Anybody who can launch a sat can track it independently, and the capacity of this system to alter an orbit would be dwarfed by the capacity of a functional satellite's maneuvering system, so concerns about transparency and the opportunity for mischief if any part of the system fell into unfriendly hands would be much less than with a higher-powered system.
Of course, a quick upgrade of the system to high-power weapons could be used as a global laser Phalanx system to help defend us from all manner of rogue asteroids, Cylons, Borg, etc...
Read: NASA Uses Story Titled "NASA Wants To Zap Space Junk With Lasers" as cover for
"U.S. Military Wants To Zap Other Countries' Satellites With Lasers"
I hope the Slashdot readerz enjoy this correction.
Yours In Novosibirsk,
Philboyd Studge, C.I.O.
P.S.: Newt Gingrich For President!
You got it! You win the prize!
No Whoooosh! for you!
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Here's how to find out: shoot it. Check to see the effect. If it's not what you want, shoot it at a different time or when its inclination is different. Lather, Rinse, Repeat until it moves the way you want. They're talking a 5 kW laser, repeated shots to gently push... Patience is the name of the game anyway. I'll bet that after 3-4 hunnert kibbles get shot down, they'll figure out a standard profile to follow.
U.S. Military Wants To Zap Other Countries' Satellites With Lasers
Just keep your satellites on your side of the damned planet and there won't be any trouble.
Have gnu, will travel.
I just shot your "research" satellite into a slightly useless orbit by accident. Too bad, you mighta got some good shots of my kid sister sunbathing in the ....
Sad to say it happened 48 times in a row accidentally, using up all of yer satellite's fuel for correcting its orbit. That's why- also to be sure it won't be used as a gen-yew-whine weapon. Read "Farside Cannon" by I-don't-rememeber.
After 50 comments there is none which asks if this could start an arms race or should Korea deem it an act of war etc etc. Oh, never mind it is us not China doing it, so it must be alright for other countries not to wet their pants.
Or worse, getting hit by a re-entering toilet.
Or an Icy BM.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Are sharks space worthy?
You are mistaken. NASA is planning to use laser cats.
- I hope they give credits to the two geniuses who developed them.
This was an episode of Futurama.
But why do they care?
It's not like they can orbit anything any more anyway.
Maybe once NASA creates a new orbital capability, it'll become an issue again, but it's not a problem for the forseeable future, unless they are contracting themselves out to a country with a space-launch capability.
--AC
Not that stupid when the laser is a dynamically tunable Free Electron Laser (FEL) with two 10 Megawatt nuclear reactors behind it. With the number of ballistic nuclear submarines scheduled for decommissioning - there are a few that can be refit and put back to sea, with installations of orbital reaching FEL systems.
Besides, no one expects that punching holes in space junk with a static laser beam will amount to anything.
The key is that a FEL can be tuned to vaporize any material within its deliverable power range. Because it is tunable through tuning the frequency of the microwave resonance cavity used to capture and pump excited electrons - the delivered frequency can be boosted well into X-ray frequencies with sufficient power.
The optics system would "paint" the target - to create a reaction force by vaporizing the surface material. With dynamic feedback, the optics would be driven to selectively paint different surface regions as the target spun in orbit - and thereby cumulatively direct the change in orbital velocity required to drop a target into the upper atmosphere: Every available square centimeter of target could be turned into a precise reaction motor. This would effectively kick the can out of orbit.
This also should tell the audience a lot about the state of defense optics now orbiting in space, when defense contractors can propose real-time control systems that depend on "seeing" rapid velocity changes in a basketball-sized object over 24,000 miles high in orbit. Remember that there were originally only 3 mirrors created for the Hubble Space Telescope - and NASA has just one of them.
BTW: FEL's were first discussed in A.E. Van Vogt's "Weapon Shops of Isher" (1951) - an interesting spin on Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning about the modern military industrial complex and its threat to the practice of governing a democracy through fear, intimidation, and corruption.
Of course, NASA isn't in the business of space defense - but the US Navy is - having effectively demonstrated a working tactical satellite defense against a real failed US recon satellite before the US Air Force could - thanks to the systems programming ingenuity of Raytheon Missile Systems.
Then again, space aliens wouldn't expect their orbiting derrieres roasted by a hidden submersible fleet.
The Weapon Shops slogan??
"The right to own weapons is the right to be free!"
DarkStarZumaBeachSurfinApocalypseWow
With such a device, they will get an escuse to bomb other people satellites. "Oops miscalculated trajectory, we are sory !" And this will create more debris and more job for them hence more money. Regulators should be carrefull at that
Are you kidding? That's a free ticket to be young forever!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.