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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."
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!
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
And what makes YOU so cocky? You watched all your Star Trek DVDs over the weekend and now you're an expert on non-existent technology and imaginary physics? The adults are working, child, go back to your crayons and Star Trek dolls.
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
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
Won't a large percentage of the junk re-enter the earth's orbit on its own given enough time?
Sure, for big enough values of "enough time". Which could be millions of years.
Although for some orbits not even that. In geostationary orbit I don't think the satellite will reenter earth's atmosphere before the sun goes red giant.
The adults are working, child, go back to your crayons and Star Trek dolls.
They are action figures dammit!
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
All that time spent playing "Asteroids" will finally pay off
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
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!
No. Sharks can't survive long enough in the vacuum of space, and would freeze to death in the ionosphere. Think man! THINK!
Yes, space is really big - but we've already had collisions. It's a little like the turn-of-the-century automobile crash in Kansas City - which only had two cars registered therein.
Then there's the Kessler Syndrome, in which case a single collision's fragment could cause additional collisions, and on and on in a chain reaction that leaves us unable to pass a belt of grinding metal bits.
OK, that may be a bit hyperbolic, but still. It's not too early to start thinking about this.
My personal suggestion is a solar-powered moon-based laser that hits anything that comes between it and earth. Small things it might vaporize, larger things will be nudged by reaction to expanding gas into a lower orbit, eventually to fall to Earth.
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
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...
... 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.
There's not as much of a space junk problem at geostationary because there's more room up that far (the amount of room available at a given altitude, after all, increases with the square of that altitude) and we don't launch as much stuff up that far. The real problem is in Low Earth Orbit, because it's so easy to reach and there's so much less space there. Just about anything in LEO will de-orbit eventually, but it may be centuries.
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
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What could possibly go wrong?
You are welcome on my lawn.
the amount of room available at a given altitude, after all, increases with the square of that altitude
The geostationary orbit has zero thickness and, therefore, zero volume. Any debris there is a very serious problem.
A small deviation from geostationary altitude will cause the debris to drift east or west and, because the orbit will never be exactly circular, it will cross the geostationary altitude at least two times a day.
Express-AM11 was knocked out by space debris, Kosmos 2251 and Iridium 33 collided destroying both.
Challenger STS-7, Endeavor STS-59, Atlantis STS-115 and Endeavor STS-118 were all hit in widows or radiators while all the shuttles, ISS and MIR were regularly hit with smaller debris.
ISS has over 100 Whipple Shields installed to reduce the impacts of small objects.
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.
NO! It becomes art!! :)
Yes. But would you prefer me to hit you in the face with a rolled up newspaper or throw the shredded bits at you?
Depends. Who has to clean up the mess afterwards?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I guarantee you if I step off the ISS, I'm plunging to earth.
you might be a troll, but I'm answering any way. You would not plunge down to earth, but you would just float next to it, maybe slowly drift away from it. There is no air to slow you down.
The whole trick is that you are actually going quite fast, about 16,000 mph or faster, you do fall down, but the earth is curved and drops away at the same rate. That's how things stay "in orbit". As there is no air, nothing slows you down and you just keep falling in a circle around the earth, constantly missing it because of your high horizontal speed.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
I think the point of the article is that no such material exists yet, and we have no clue how to make something like that in an economic way.
The biggest problem with most of these solutions, is getting them "up there". Moving things to space is very expensive. It's hard to get a feeling for it.
I once compared it to the the Trust SSC, the first car to go Mach 1: 1,228 km/h (763 mph). To reach orbit you need to go about 40,000 km/h, given that the energy goes with the square of the speed, you need (40,000/1,228)^2 = 1061 times more energy. In other words, the energy required to reach the speed of sound, is only 0.1% of what is required to get into space. That might give you an idea of the challenge.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor