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Report Warns of Space Junk Reaching a Tipping Point
intellitech sends this excerpt from a Reuters report:
"The amount of debris orbiting the Earth has reached a tipping point for collisions, which would in turn generate more of the debris that threatens astronauts and satellites, according to a U.S. study released on Thursday (PDF). ... The amount of orbital debris tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network jumped from 9,949 cataloged objects in December 2006 to 16,094 in July 2011, with nearly 20 percent of the objects stemming from the destruction of the Chinese FENGYUN 1-C satellite, the National Research Council said. ... the panel made two dozen recommendations for NASA to mitigate and improve the orbital debris environment, including collaborating with the State Department to develop the legal and regulatory framework for removing junk from space. The study, 'Limiting Future Collision Risk to Spacecraft: An Assessment of NASA's Meteoroid and Orbital Debris Programs,' was sponsored by NASA."
A small fleet of net-flinging spacecraft could clear every big piece of space junk out of low-Earth orbit within a dozen years, according to a researcher working on the concept. Each spacecraft, known as an ElectroDynamic Debris Eliminator (EDDE), would capture orbital debris in a net, then drag the junk down out of harm's way. The EDDEs would draw their power from the sun and from Earth's magnetic field rather than rely on costly chemical propellants, helping keep costs down, said Jerome Pearson, president of Star Technology and Research, Inc.
There's a very real danger at this point that we will soon run into a real Kessler syndrome situation in low-Earth orbit. This would be really bad since this is both a really useful area to have satellites and the area where it is cheapest to put them in orbit. We have taken a few steps to help matters. For example, it became apparent that the Delta rockets were causing a lot of space debris and the more recent versions have been redesigned to minimize those issues. Unfortunately, many rockets from other countries and some other US rockets still have serious problems. There's no indication that China is taking any serious steps to minimize space debris. There have been some attempts to require people who put up satellites to have plans for either deorbiting them or parking them in graveyard orbits. That's now being done for most civilian satellites, but we don't know what if anything is being done for military satellites. This is in some sense one massive tragedy-of-the-commons type situation.
The current engineering solutions for removing space debris are also lacking. There's a proposal to use lasers to ablate small bits of debris but this is politically not great since lasers powerful enough to do that could be used as weapons. Most of the other proposals have other problems or have the same problem: essentially any method of easily deorbiting objects is going to be a threat to satellites, and so for obvious reasons governments don't want other governments to have that sort of capability.
One point which this new study makes that I had not seen before is the point that the calculated cost of satellite collisions is underestimated because not only do satellites collisions destroy satellites but they also create more debris which can then endanger other satellites and requires further tracking.
That's true with every living thing.
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They'll start taking it seriously when multi-million dollar satellites start being obliterated.
In the US, money is a far more serious matter than human life.
Zero to space junk denialism in less than half an hour :-(
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The ones you list where in decaying orbits, and just about to reenter.
China's satellite wasn't re-entering, it was in a pretty stable orbit and as such the debris will be there for a very long time.
You are not stupid, stop acting like it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I don't study whales professionally, but I would wager that whales shit where they eat. It is only their low numbers that make them look like they are not fouling their living space.
until somebody die from it. sorry, but it's been that way for centuries.
Nobody will take it seriously until an entertainment satellite gets taken out.
Does the veritable holocaust that occurred when the first green plants started their uncontrolled emissions of powerful oxidizing agents into the atmosphere, annihilating the previously anaerobic biosphere count?
Humans probably win on points because of the sheer creativity of their pollution, and the fact that they do it despite having brains large enough to predict that they will suffer for it; but they aren't exactly the first organism to synthesize something that didn't (yet) have anything evolved to break it down.
There was a presentation a few weeks ago by G. Ganguli from Naval Research Laboratory where he suggested placing a layer of very fine dust in an LEO band. The dust should be too fine to cause any impact damage but thick enough that it increases drag, decaying the orbit of debris. A satellite would be unharmed, although its orbit would also decay slightly. You can even tune the dust's own decay rate to match that of the debris size you're targeting.
Couldn't find that original paper online, but here's another: http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.1401