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Boeing Proposes Using Gas Clouds To Bring Down Orbital Debris
cylonlover writes "Boeing has filed a patent application for a method of disposing of dead satellites and other debris orbiting the earth by hitting them with a puff of gas. The method, which is still at the conceptual stage, is designed to slow down satellites, forcing them to re-enter the atmosphere without sending up more space junk that itself will need disposing of. The idea is to send a small satellite into orbit containing a gas generator. This generator can be a tank of cryogenic gas, such as xenon or krypton, or a device designed to vaporize a heavy metal or some relatively heavy elements like fluorine, chlorine, bromine, or iodine. This gas would be released as a cloud in the same orbit as the debris, but traveling in the opposite direction."
Clever of them to patent this, since knock-off space-junk removal systems are in such high demand.
A space fart!
It's an apparently wholly new and unique method for doing something in the physical world. Why would it make them evil to patent that?
If you think about it the answer should be obvious.
What about the increased amounts of persistent drag that these clouds will present to later satelite deployments? Spraying the gas does not mean it magically disappears after it has done its job. While inside the roche limit, the gas clouds will eventually (after thousands of years) fall back into the atmosphere, the cloud doesn't magically vanish after being sprayed, and widespread use of the technology would make it radically difficult to orbit new satelites.
If used outside the roche limit, the clouds become persistent!
I don't think there is much debris needing deorbited outside the roche, but with politicians and corporations at the helm, you can't be too careful.
The cloud wouldn't last very long, but long enough to hit the debris. By the time it hit, the gas would have expanded until it was almost a vacuum, so it wouldn't damage the debris. In fact, an astronaut caught in such a cloud probably wouldn't even notice it.
..the satellite with the gas generator now that you have it up there?
Sounds like more space junk to me.
It would almost be better to make a disposable satellite that latches onto the target space debris and uses thrusters to slow both units down to a orbit destabilizing speed. That way the orbital debris is removed, and there's not another hunk of junk floating around up there.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
How do they propose to keep the non-junk from being de-orbited by the same gas? (I'm too lazy to read TFA.)
Physics.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
Well, I tried to read TFPA, and IANARS (rocket scientist), but I suspect that they're able to get the math right such that they can target very specific areas.
LegendMUD
...sandcasters!
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
Not really. Although there is 'high demand' for technology to solve this problem, the only customer is the government. And the government has unrestricted use of any patent it wants. Including subcontracting the equipment and execution of the task to any subcontractor it desires.
Have gnu, will travel.
be safer, cheaper and just as effective? Assuming each balloon decayed (i.e. oriented itself with orifice pointing directly away from Earth and releasing a puff) within a set period so as not to continue to interfere with other traffic.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
1. Wait the required 17 years.
2. Use gas clouds to bring down orbital debris (including missing socks and underpants).
3. PROFIT!!!
Disagree; that's probably far more wasteful than one (or even a few) 'space garbage disposals'. From a basic physics perspective, you're then having to spend energy to slow both the junk and the 'disposable satellite' (requiring fuel, not the much cheaper transient gas cloud), and you have a 1:1 ratio of disposal satellites to junk. AND you have engineer something that can latch onto many different sizes and shapes of junk up there. It wouldn't surprise me if Boeing already considered that way, and came up with this (more ingenuous) method.
LegendMUD
Cool story, bro.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
...might be another man's satellite.
My bet is that the first implementation of this is an anti-satellite weapon.
Please do correct me if I am wrong, but this reads like a patent application that contains a novel, concrete implementation of an idea that isn't necessarily obvious to one skilled in the art. That is what patents are supposed to protect, and I have to say I have no problem with that.
It's perhaps the first /. post in a long time that contains a patent that respects both the spirit and the letter of what a patent is supposed to be. It also sounds fairly ingenious and very interesting considering the possibilities, so props to Boeing.
This is such an obvious idea that it isn't right that it should be patentable. There are only a few ways of slowing an orbiting object down so that it de-orbits. The way nature does it is by putting gas in the way, called the atmosphere.
Clearly, we would need to send an even bigger satellite to take care of the old one. And then a bigger one, and then a bigger one, until one day we make a board with a nail in it so big, it destroys the whole world!!
*Maniacal laughter*
Newton claims prior art.
Easy, you just shoot it down with a missile. Any small pieces that are left over could be cleaned up with another gas generating satellite.
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So basically we're claiming to patent inelastic collisions? So pretty much ANYTHING bringing something out of orbit by physically altering its orbit (which is almost always the result of an inelastic collision) will violate this claim. Broad much?
So basically we're claiming to patent a collision between two bodies traveling in opposing trajectories? .. seriously? Yeah, I was totally planning on knocking debris out of space by throwing rocks at it in the same direction it's moving!
So basically we're claiming to patent clouds between 100 and 400 km above Earth's surface? Because someone can avoid violating this by.. you know.. ignoring the debris between 100km and 400km. Right?
So basically we're claiming to patent clouds formed in different target zones? Is it possible to be any more vague?
So your projectile that will collide with the debris will fall back into the atmosphere. So would just about any other projectile-based solution. It'd be pretty damn hard to hit an orbiting object with another object with enough velocity to knock the orbiting object into the atmosphere and ricochet the projectile out of orbit in excess of escape velocity.
So basically we're claiming to patent spheres and hemispheres of gasses. Looks like a competitor will need to use rectangles, because this is the rounded-corners patent of gas clouds.
But seriously. C'mon.
Docking with an orbiting satellite, especially one that's no longer under your control, is very difficult.
As long as it is still under control when it is at end of life you just have it shoot the last bit of gas out the side opposite the earth to de-orbit it.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Given the cost of getting material up in space to start with, I'd rather see this 'space junk' mined / recycled / reused to build something else up in space, on the moon or somewhere else rather than bring it back down.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Stop bringing common-sense into this, dammit!
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
I recall a plan from waaaay back in the 1980's of equipping the space shuttle with a high pressure water nozzle. I forget the exact details of how it worked, but it was something like the water would turn into a stream of frozen water particles that would hit the debris, absorbing kinetic energy of the debris as it vaoprized...or some such shit.
Slowing debris down in the manner you have described is going to be very fuel intensive if you expect this disposable satellite to speed up to catch another piece of debris and slow down, rinse and repeat. I assume you aren't proposing disposable satellites for each piece of space debris.
That's what I was thinking.
Just releasing the gas in the path of the target satellite would slow down or speed up your vehicle enough to require course corrections. If you were to have enough gas on board to do two simultaneous releases on opposite sides of the vehicle you might be able to mitigate this.
But simply getting to the proper place for EACH of the thousands of sats and space junk targets would take a lot of maneuvering.
This seems overly complex and subtle. Its main advantage seems to be that it leaves no debris in orbit.
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That's the equivalent of having one trash truck for every house and then just driving it into the landfill instead of dumping it. Good plan.
The correct way is to shoot the gas in the direction you're travelling so that you slow down, which is a full 90 degrees from what you suggest.
Who said anything about BIG.
The beauty of this approach is that the gas delivery vehicle need not be all that big to hurry the orbital decay of lots of dead sats and space junk.
Think of it as a tire spike strip for space.
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This reminds me of another method using light instead of gas, which was described at a recent space conference. The idea was to pulse laser light toward the west (since most space debris is traveling predominantly eastward), and over time the photons alone could provide enough delta-v to nudge things out of orbit more quickly. For the big stuff they have other plans in mind, such as electrostatic tethers and micro-rockets. But for little stuff, the light pulse would be a cost-effective "shotgun" approach to deal with the cloud of crap that's too small to track.
Sorry I can't find a link at the moment. I saw it a few months ago on YouTube from either NewSpace or SpaceUp, or ISDC or one of the other conferences in the last year or two.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Boeing:
LegendMUD
So you are telling me if the orbit was changed to being much lower and closer to the atmosphere that it would not end up slowing down and re-entering?
Aren't there stationary orbits? Couldn't you end up entering one by slowing down?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
1 have it shoot the payload so that the sat gets deorbited
2 make the sat just bulky enough to do the job (like one of those drink pouches only with more gizmos)
3 set things up so that your target junk hits the sat on the way down
4 put a sign on the side "free junk and wait for a "purple neck" alien to grab it
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That's not how orbital velocity's work. You're not just hovering in space over the planet, you're in active freefall moving so fast you're traveling over the horizon before you hit the ground.
Frankly I never understood this very well either, untill I started playing the game "Kerbal Space Program". Suddenly, I understand why firing the gas into the direction you're traveling makes way more sense, than firing it into space to move you 'closer' to the earth. You're already actively falling inward to earth. All you'd do is slightly speed or slow yourself down, depending on how off center the gas release was. If it was perfectly centered you might manage to oblong the orbit slightly, but unless you had a lot of force, you wont deorbit that way.
Actually, for those sats that share orbits, this would be a problem, which is why they use a gas that would disperse in short order.
Presumably any sats that were not targets, but still close enough to the gas cloud, would eventually need a slight nudge to correct their orbit, but then that kind of orbit correction happens occasionally anyway. (One definition of a dead satellite is one that has no maneuvering fuel left to do station keeping.). So if your satellite is still operational it probably would not be affected by the gas.
This ability to affect a large area actually works in your favor. You can deorbit entire debris fields with this technique.
However, some space junk deorbited this way could drift into conflict with low earth orbit satellites, like weather sats and GPS sats. So some planning would be necessary. And since the gas is designed to ever so slowly deorbit the junk, your ability to control this is minimal at best, because it could take years.
I'm glad Boeing patented this because they actually have the ability to deliver, whereas some patent troll could just use it to extract money.
I'd be happier if they just built one and and demonstrated it, and then offered it for sale. Even happier if they just declared the patent free to the world.
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Simple, you describe how your concept will work.
Proceed beyond the conceptual stage and determine if your concept holds up. If it does, congrats, your patent is valid.
If it doesn't work, you better hurry up and get a NEW patent because your old patent won't cover your now changed method/invention.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
So you are telling me if the orbit was changed to being much lower and closer to the atmosphere that it would not end up slowing down and re-entering?
Possibly, yes. Depending on where it is and how fast it's going, simply vectoring it "downward" might only push it into a more-elliptical, but still stable, orbit. Slowing itself down (i.e. doing to itself what it's just been doing to loads of space junk) would be more surefire.
Geostationary orbits are extremely tricky mathematically - it's not just about your velocity, it's about your orbital radius, too. There's literally only one altitude/velocity combination where Earth's gravity can keep you in a stable, circular, stationary orbit. And you have to be above the equator, too. Not much chance of that for something whose primary goal is intercepting other satellites' orbits.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
You enter higher or lower orbits by speeding up or slowing down. If you fire at right angles to your direction of travel you increase your velocity and end up in non-circular orbits.
You've just described the flaw in the plan: who would buy such a thing? Boeing isn't going to build them out of the goodness of their heart. The people who put satellites up would benefit from clearing out the orbit they want to use, but that is nowhere near as simple as putting one of these sweepers into that orbit, only retrograde, because of all the different orbits of the debris that intersects it. It would be ridiculously expensive to try to clear one orbit for one satellite.
What we have here is an example of a tragedy of the commons because no one owns the valuable space where satellites live. Perhaps an international consortium of space-faring nations could claim it all and put orbits up for auction, then use the proceeds to clean it up?
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.
Actually, the patent does not mention anything about the size of the delivery vehicle.
1000 kg is well within the lift capabilities of even the smallest launch vehicles still in operation. Only marginally bigger than Opportunity Rover, which was delivered to mars by an Atlas V 451, which can easily put 10,000kg in LEO.
That is not big by standard of satellites in orbit.
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Hey.. Not sure about that one, but it's been a long time since I actually felt that a "cloud" mentionned on Slashdot might prove useful!
But then I read it was about a gas cloud.. Not some vapor- oh wait..
Yes, it is. It means that if the US government decides to do this it or whoever wins the contract to do it for them will have to purchase a license from Boeing.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Clearly the customers here are Governments.
One of the first orbits to be cleared would probably be around the ISS.
John Campbell of Iridium spoke at a June 2007 forum discussing the difficulty of handling all the notifications they were getting regarding close approaches, which numbered 400 per week (for approaches within 5 km) for the entire Iridium constellation. He estimated the risk of collision per conjunction as one in 50 million. Yet in 2009, less than two years after he made his prediction, his company lost Iridium 33 to a collision.
To date, there have been eight known high-speed collisions in all, most of which were only noticed well after the fact.
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Unaffected?!? If it requires you to use your fuel faster your satellite is very much affected! Like you said, a dead satellite is often just one with no more fuel for orbit corrections.
"Clever of them to patent this, since knock-off space-junk removal systems are in such high demand"
If one does not think that the orbit around earth is going to be increasingly cluttered on is just not looking very far.
It is sad on a supposed tech and science site for someone to suggest that the clutter will not become a problem.
The refrain seems to be why patent anything that doesn't have immediate use.
What a crock of shit.
It is cool. Might turn a satellite into a cloud of debris, not a slower solid satellite.
But is it obvious, if you know astronomy, read manga, or just live in space for a while and try to stop debris with what you have on hand?
A "micro dust cloud" sounds similar to Boeing's cloud of heavy gas (a "nano dust cloud").
http://zerorobotics.mit.edu/ZRHS2012/RetroSPHERES.pdf
Also recent news, but "The US Naval Research Laboratory is proposing to encircle the Earth with tungsten dust in an attempt to bring down dangerous space junk"
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/423629/orbiting-dust-storm-could-remove-space-junk/
IANAP but "Their scheme is to release some 20 tons of tungsten dust at an altitude of 1100km, creating a thin shell of particles that will entirely envelop the Earth," that sounds like a baaaad idea!
ARXIV black hole paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9512101.pdf
In 1995 these researchers modelled collisions of supersonic gas streams and found they are efficient at circularizing debris orbits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_Mile_(manga)
Dammit, icebike, I was just trying out some material for my Boeing/space junk standup routine!
LegendMUD
Perhaps an international consortium of space-faring nations could claim it all and put orbits up for auction, then use the proceeds to clean it up?
They can start by selling .com, .org, .edu, .org and .net orbits.
Charge just enough to keep the orbits clean. What could go wrong?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
How long is "not very long"? Xenon atoms from a boiling liquid at only move at about 5 m/s. That's not enough of a disturbance relative to the orbital velocity (measured in kilometers per second) to make them fall out of orbit. (The starting orbit is stable, or the space-junk would not need removing.)
The gas atoms would have to collide with something before they'd fall down. And space being near-vacuum, it could take some time before that happens. So there will be an expanding cloud of gas that stays in orbit for a very long time slowing down space-junk and functioning satellites alike.
Here's a quick summary of the procedure you're talking about: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/423302/nasa-studies-laser-for-removing-space-junk/
Initially, they were thinking of ablating the surface of the junk with the laser, but turns out you need a hell of a lot of power to do that, so it wouldn't be very economical. More recent calculations suggest exposure to a ~5kW laser might be enough to decay the orbit enough to bring it back into the atmosphere where it'll burn up, and they estimate that a device such as this, big enough to handle 5-10 objects a day, could be put together for a few million dollars.
Xenon and krypton are rare and expensive, especially xenon, which is used in spacecraft ion engines. Using it for this purpose is a serious waste.
Because It's not really all that unique
Why are the links so recent? Because after that collision 2 years ago they put out a request for people to think about this problem.
Damn, it's almost as if they couldn't send it up with a specific plan to say, "When available gas stores reaches 1%, use that remainder to deorbit satellite."
you'd think these nasa types would be smart enough to think of it, when I just did in about 5 seconds of thinking.
But surely you're right - they never considered the problem.
Due to things like radiation pressure and trace atmosphere, etc., the smaller an object is in near to intermediate orbits, the quicker it de-orbits. Gas should not be a problem, and might even have issue with it de-orbiting too quickly. I've seen talks on using very small dust to de-orbit junk before. The nice thing with the dust, is you can chose the size just right so that it is de-orbited by the such effects at the same rate it de-orbits the junk it is removing. Hence you could get away with using a very small amount of concentrated dust, such that it has both a cumulative effect on stuff it de-orbits and sweeps out a bunch of orbits as returns down to Earth over the time of a few years. Additionally, the size that would work well for such dust would not much impact on things larger than a few centimeters. The main goal was to remove junk too small to be tracked by radar, and way too numerous to remove one at a time with something like a laser. It could lead to slight more fuel usage of satellite (still some fraction of a percent), although some of the companies involved were saying they might just need to plan on adding a little bit of extra fuel to satellites because it is more important to do the cleaning than to save fuel.
Not only that, but you are sending up a unit to bring down a piece of space debris.
So are you launching an object on top of a rocket into space. Then you have to blow the aerodynamic covers off while in orbit.
At that point the craft can latch on to one of the 2 covers now in orbit and bring it back down.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I seriously doubt that. If large defense contractors wanted to sell an ASAT weapon, they'd try to sell a product they've already developed (more profitable). You know, like the stuff that they've already developed in 1985 (ASM-135 ASAT) or stuff they fired about four years ago (RIM-161 Standard Missile 3).
Plausible deniability. This sounds like something you can deploy without much trace at all.
Heck, you could even just assert you had a "coolant leak" on your satellite :)
No, this is not a tragedy of the commons, this is yet another example of externalising expenses - same as dumping toxic shit into a river or burning coal to generate electricity.
Unless there's a bill to pay or laws to prohibit it, you can get away with pretending that the expense of managing and disposing of your waste doesn't exist (and, magically, for YOU it doesn't exist).
You get the benefit of your waste-producing activity, but everyone else has to pay for it.
The "Tragedy of the Commons" is a popular meme for libertarian types who want everything to be owned (preferably by them so they can extract monopoly rents from the previously public resource)...and because TTotC is a such a popular and self-serving meme they are selectively blind to the thousands upon thousands of examples of privately-owned resources which are completely trashed because their only value to their owner is in the maximum extraction of profit in the shortest time (strip mining, toxic or radioactive tailings dams, clear-fell logging for example) or as a dumping ground for waste from some other activity.
But a commons doesn't have to be owned to be managed successfully, it just has to be regulated - so that, e.g, one private company can't take a giant dump in everyone else's favourite picnic spot. Regulation, however, is anathema to libertarian types. They feel that if they want to lay a turd on someone else's picnic blanket, either directly or a few miles upstream, then they should be able to do so - "Freedom!"
A large cost of space travel is getting everything needed for the journey from Earth into space. Here we have a large quantity of materials perfect for spacecraft manufacturing already in space. Build a recycling plant or leave it for someone else, but pushing it towards Earth just seems like the epitome of waste.
400 * 52^2 ? No clue why but gets you the million..
bah. Why waste time with gas? We have missile. Just shoot smaller pieces with smaller missile. Even cheaper since smaller, right?
:P
Personally in favour of 5000 square miles of flypaper unrolled in orbit. Unsticky the sats you wanted to keep, deorbit the rest. Flawless, I know
Seems to me that outer space is outside the jurisdiction of any government or court. If it's not, then whose is it?
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
In the voice of Samuel L. Jackson: Motherfuckin' PHYSICS!
FTFY
Everybody uses broad generalizations.
The gas would be moving at about 14 km/s relative to the satellite, since it would be in a reverse orbit.
I was thinking that making the orbit non-circular enough that it intersects with the atmosphere could be the most efficient way to deorbit in some cases.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
A method for clearing space junk and or destroying enemy communication satellites.