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Ugly Truth of Space Junk
fysdt writes "Dealing with the decades of detritus from using outer space — human-made orbital debris — is a global concern, but some experts are now questioning the feasibility of the wide range of 'solutions' sketched out to grapple with high-speed space litter. What may be shaping up is an 'abandon in place' posture for certain orbital altitudes — an outlook that flags the messy message resulting from countless bits of orbital refuse. US General William Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command, underscored the worrisome issue of orbital debris during a presentation at the National Space Symposium on April 12, 2011. In a recent conference here, Gen. William Shelton, commander of the US Air Force Space Command, relayed his worries about rising amounts of human-made space junk."
What makes them experts? How much space junk have they cleaned up? Which orbital paths have they cleared?
We could send up a crew of young people to have wacky adventures and fixate on each other. In their spare time they could clean up junk manually. I like the manga/anime that deals with this, Planetes
Man, you really need that seminar!
I think if you build giant laser systems and let kids blast space debris and reward them in a ranking system, they will gladly do it for free and likely do it better than anyone else.
One expert is - "orbital debris expert within the Space Department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md."
The other is - Gen. William Shelton, commander of the U.S. Air Force Space Command, who has been assigned to USAF space posts since 1976.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_L._Shelton
Won't a large percentage of the junk re-enter the earth's orbit on its own given enough time?
We've tried nothin' and we're all out of ideas...
Seriously, next batch of research missions should be various cleaning devices to see what they can do and how well they do it.
crazy dynamite monkey
Space sharks with lasers. Duh.
On a serious note, if I was Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic, I'd start looking at clean-up contracts. While ground-based lasers may lose too much energy trying to make it out of the atmosphere, an airborne system might have a bit more punch....
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
This isn't panic time. Low Earth orbit really shouldn't be much of a problem. Without constant effort stuff tends to come down and the smaller the faster. The higher orbits are high volume areas. That only leaves the middle to really worry about, right?
Yea a lose bolt can really ruin your day (or satellite) right now but we are going to have to develop some defenses. Otherwise micrometeors will eventually score a hit. Again, take it in threes. Come up with some sort of armor for microscopic stuff to embed into, some sort of active (laser?) defense for medium and dodge anything big enough to see in time to light an engine.
But while Science! used to be optimistic and forward looking these days it is timid and obsessed with Doom! and what might go wrong.
Democrat delenda est
Have NERF create huge capsules that when released into space expand into 2 mile wide, bio-degradable, sticky NERF balls. Launch fifty of them into a slowly degrading orbit that clears a hundred mile ring of space until they burn up in the atmosphere along with the junk.
Or maybe a geosynchronous, miles long and wide foam mat that takes away some kinetic energy every time something passes through it so that they fall to earth on their own.
Or just go for the worlds largest NERF sponge ball in space and move it around to get the worst stuff. Space might be big but a ten mile wide NERF ball would certainly slow a lot of that debris down! Even better, paint it to look like the Death Star!
... n't really solve anything.)
Don't shoot anything up until you know how to get it away from there.
I found a large piece of paper on the ground, so I picked it up. I shredded it and scattered it back on the ground. Isn't it still trash?
And also we haven't been dropping crap up there for too many years, from too many spacecraft. We're sort of like Columbus and his boys worrying about a toffee wrapper that someone left behind on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean.
Can we get back to this in, say, two centuries when there's enough crap to worry about? We have other issues more pressing that this (oh sorry - forgot this was slashdot....thought I was in a US Government thinktank...).
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
U.S. General William Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command, underscored the worrisome issue of orbital debris during a presentation at the National Space Symposium on April 12, 2011. In a recent conference here, Gen. William Shelton, commander of the U.S. Air Force Space Command, relayed his worries about rising amounts of human-made space junk.
Two generals with the same name and the same job, expressing concerns on the same topic!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Problem solved.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
Cleaning military bases that are de-comissioned is usually a very expensive task : the military doesn't take care of their own environments.
Did they do better in space?
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
IIRC there are treaties that prevent the weaponization of space. A "navigational" laser capable of vaporizing "medium" sized objects might fall under some kind of prohibited dual use technology. If dual use technology is allowed then I expect many nations will be researching "navigational" lasers.
Couldn't they just use a laser on a satellite to push all the debris into the atmosphere?
I don't imagine it would have to be a very powerful laser to do that for small debris.
You can't take the sky from me
Yet another problem that can be solved by suitable applications of high explosives.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
He's just trying to clear a nice approach eliptical for the mothership to come down and enslave mankind. Don't listen to a word of it. Space junk makes intraorbital navigation hazardous, and that hazard is our best unnatural defense against the alien overlords.
--
Toro
Which I for one do not welcome!
It was an 80s-ish RPG. One of the background stories was that Word War 3 broke out and because of all the space weapons and counter-weapons blasting each other to bits and throwing up buckshot at each other, Earth's orbit becomes full of so much shrapnel that it's impossible to achieve orbit. When the Chinese tested that laser on a satellite target, that's what I immediately thought of. Space weapons are a stupid, expensive, potentially disastrous idea. Look at how bad space junk is getting and we haven even *tried* to fill orbits with crap.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
next batch of research missions should be various cleaning devices to see what they can do and how well they do it
"Barring the discovery of a disruptive technology within the next decade or so, there will be no practical removal solution," Kaplan added. "We simply lack the technology to economically clean up space."
Problem is, "space" didn't get that name by accident. It's big. And the debris are millions of pieces. A big laser, you say? The Soviet Union went broke trying to develop one. Perhaps a big sheet made of monocrystalline unobtainium would do the trick.
In the end, we may be able to catch a few pieces of junk, at a cost of a few million dollars each. If only we had the several hundreds of trillions of dollars it would take to catch each of them...
You'd need to weight the bounties by the risk the junk presents, it's orbit and velocity and mass.
Can't we just borrow that?
On a more serious side, I read an admittedly far fetched idea of putting a 'fishing nets' in the orbits of the smaller bits of debris. Yes, tons of problems with it, but it would be nice if we could 'sweep' up a bunch of the smaller stuff. I forget the details, but from what I remember (that's a chancy proposition in itself) it seemed to be plausible.
I admit, I am way out of my league here, so feel free to ignore as hard as possible.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
... we haven't been dropping crap up there for too many years, from too many spacecraft. We're sort of like Columbus and his boys worrying about a toffee wrapper that someone left behind on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean.
Wrong analogy. To continue with the Columbus theme a better analogy would be dropping off a bunch of pigs at each island you visit. When you return later you find far more than the few pigs you dropped off. Like pigs, satellite debris "breeds". 1 item of debris + 1 item of debris = *many* items of debris, where many can be many orders of magnitude larger than two.
Consider the example from the article. The number of debris items increased by 25% from a *single* event, China testing an anti-satellite weapon. While this may be a worse case event, an accidental collision between two satellites could similarly generate a cloud of thousands of debris items.
Can we get back to this in, say, two centuries when there's enough crap to worry about? We have other issues more pressing that this (oh sorry - forgot this was slashdot....thought I was in a US Government thinktank...).
A think tank would hopefully possess enough potential to realize that when TVs go blank, phones no longer make connections, ships/planes/cars can no longer navigate, etc then the average person might care.
and as this is in fact rocket science the problem is we have 3 different "speed bands" we are working with
1 the junk that is going slow enough to fall out of orbit
(in a more or less short period of time)
2 the stuff that is mid range speed (could take like "forever" to fall out unless somebody/something whacks it in the right direction)
3 the high speed stuff (this is very rare and is the stuff that heading out into deepish space)
the problem with 1 and 2 (mostly 2) is hitting this stuff CORRECTLY is very hard to do (ideal situation is it burns up on reentry with "does not hit anything important" as a push bet)
the worst case is you hit somebodies in service satellite or have a chunk of something wipe out a State building or something else and cause an international incident
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Which happens to be the commander of a Space Control Agency?
How subtle!
NUKE IT FROM ORBIT!!
I have been hearing about the space junk problem for maybe 20 years, but has anything significant actually ever been hit/destroyed?
Space sharks. With lasers.
I'm pretty sure this can be solved by Superman. He can just go around the earth a few times to speed up the rotation, and thus, gravity, sucking in all the shit up there back into our atmosphere so we can start from scratch.
Right?
I read recently that the decay of garbage in LEO is actually lower than expected due to the extended sunspot minimum. It seems that sunspots have a significant effect on Earth's thermosphere, a tenuous portion of the atmosphere that extends into LEO and - although it's a millionth as thick as the atmosphere at sea level - exerts drag that eventually brings LEO satellites down. Perhaps the orbit of ISS does not decay as quickly as Skylab did - because there was more thermosphere in the '70's. Does this mean that there will be an increase in LEO decay once we get a strong sunspot cycle? This cycle is not so strong, and it could be several cycles before we get a really big one again.
Bruce Perens.
Space junk comes in so many sizes. Satellites and space stations have shielding to protect themselves from the smallest junk pieces. They can also make slight shifts in their orbits in order to avoid collisions with the pieces of junk that can be tracked, down to about 4 inches.
But the junk between about 0.5 -4 inches is too small to be tracked, and cannot be effectively shielded against. They have to rely on luck...
Junk in low earth orbit is also more likely to be traveling in all sorts of different orbits (inclination, eccentricity and precession rates), so a satellite could be hit by junk pieces coming from several different directions at once!
Could you design a MAD system that aims to make space effectively unusable? Essentially make a collection of ICBMs with warheads full of marbles. Spray assorted orbits with enough shrapnel and you increase the danger of catastrophe for any satellite to the point where they are no longer viable tools? Not directly offensiv
We'll warm up the atmosphere so much that the expansion from the heat will thicken it enough to quickly bring down everything in Low Earth Orbit.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
1. Pick a substance that can be shipped to space fairly gracefully in large, thin, flexible sheets. You'd need BIG sheets. This can either be something that is already adhesive or can be activated or coated with adhesive in orbit. Either way, it should be cheap and disposable. The edges of this material should be fairly durable so that if it tears, the torn bits will hang on to the edges. High relative-velocity impacts should either go right through the material or stick to it.
2. Attach a small, single-use, steerable rocket to one corner of each sheet. These need not be designed to stand the test of time but should be durable enough not to break apart on use.
3. Ship many of these to a 'messy' orbit as cheaply as possible. Deploy, unfold, and activate the adhesive as necessary, preferably without any kind of human-aided EVA. Ideally this should be done with the cheapest, lightest of rockets, and activation and unfolding is something that should happen entirely electronically.
4. Let these orbit a few times, sweeping up crap. Monitor from the ground via telescope.
5. Activate the single-use rocket remotely to nudge the whole mess into reentry.
6. Repeat as necessary to clean the orbit.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Why doesn't the shit FALL DOWN?!?!? I guarantee you if I step off the ISS, I'm plunging to earth. Yet this stuff just floats there like nothing? It really makes no sense.
However, if you step back for a second, and compare our "orbit" with our environment, we see an interesting trend.
Even the smartest of us didn't forsee something as simple as "Hey - if you put something up there, you're going to have to deal with it."
Unless of course you don't believe in global warming, then please take your trollisms elsewhere.
Create a material that is like an aerogel only that dissipates over time in a vacuum. Sticky is good too. Expands after an impact is also good for better LEO aerobraking effects if cleaning LEO paths. In upper paths make it selectively reflective (requires stable insertion and planned impacts ...) then it sails to a safe place or destruction. But simplest is just a material that will entangle, that also dissipates in a vacuum. Set a quantity of it in retrograde orbit that you want cleared. Impact with orbiting junk, momentum is reduced. Pretty fireworks in the upper atmosphere. Remaining material that missed the collecting of something dissipates harmlessly.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
"What may be shaping up is an "abandon in place" posture for certain orbital altitudes -- an outlook that flags the messy message resulting from countless bits of orbital refuse."
What is that in ENGLISH? Journalists today are such idiots, they start making up their own version of the English language, and then begin to believe that it's normal, the more they use it.
"an outlook that flags the messy message"
Huh?
Time to bring back the Vulture from the "Jettison Scrap and Salvage Company" aka - Salvage1
What about deploying some sort of particulate cloud that's dense enough to slow down junk enough over prolonged (years?) period of time with periodic re-application? Something that's dense enough to slow down unpowered articles but allow powered craft to deal with these "clouds" with minimal fuel usage?
Sure, all we need is a huge amount of unobtanium.
Unfortunately, the technological advances developed during the search for and manufacture of said unobtanium also vastly cheapens the cost of computer AI and cyborgs which leads to the rise of a global military industrial corporation named Genom.
After the Second Great Kanto Earthquake of 2025 divides Tokyo's in two, physically as well as culturally, the vast difference of wealth distribution sparks a cultural upheaval and Genom looses its cyborgs on humanity.
Our only hope will be the all-female powered armor equipped mercenaries known only as The Knight Sabers.
Trust me -- The space junk problem pales in comparison to the issues caused by its solution.
Nuke it from Orbit. It's the only way to be sure!
One solution which I heard from somewhere a long time ago (I can't remember who) proposed that if you're going to discard large pieces of equipment (such as fuel tanks etc...) that it be designed in such a way that it could be useful.
Perhaps some of the debris can be made into a space station, or a refueling station, or something like that.
I don't know if this would apply to any of the junk already up there, but the next time a rocket is designed it could be taken into consideration.
Then perhaps we could launch some orbital construction robots to collect the junk and piece together something useful.
The idea I had heard involved taking the largest of the fuel tanks from the space shuttle's launch and either welding or riveting them together into a circular space station. That would at least account for the hull of it though more material would be needed to complete it.
Megamaid!
Just so long as she doesn't go from suck to blow, because that would really suck.. I mean, blow. Whatever.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Getting mass out of the gravity well is still expensive. Why not use a form of Solar Laser to move the junk to an L-Zone then build a drone operated Test-Bed in the L-Zone to recycle the mass. This would make a boring Science Fiction story, but the commercial applications? Maybe AAA for spent Satellites?
What we really need is an Adopt an Orbit program. This Orbit Adopted by Shriners #123 or This Orbit Adopted by Boys and Girls Club ABC etc. Then all we'd have to worry about is a few signs like that, some orange bags scattered around and the occasional crew wearing orange vests.
We could try and roll all of it into a giant ball. All while singing a merry song: naaaa na na na na na