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Space Junk 'Cleaning' Missions Urgently Needed
Following a conference on space debris, the European Space Agency has warned that the amount of space junk floating around in orbit is a problem that needs to be dealt with 'urgently.' They are calling for a number of test missions to examine different methods of controlling or removing the debris. "Our understanding of the growing space debris problem can be compared with our understanding of the need to address Earth’s changing climate some 20 years ago," said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the agency's Space Debris office. A couple years ago we discussed an idea for de-orbiting space junk by hitting it with a laser to change its momentum. An Australian company has now received funding from NASA and the Australian government to try just that. "We've been developing tracking systems using lasers for some years, so we can actually track very small objects with a laser rangefinder to very high accuracy. ... If you allow that velocity to change over a period of perhaps 24 hours, then you can get actually a 100-meter shift in the location of an object to deflect it from colliding with another space debris object." Other plans are in development as well, and there currently exists an international guideline saying that new hardware must de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere after 25 years of operation — but compliance is lagging. Meanwhile, collision events are becoming more common (PDF), and experts worry about the safety of the International Space Station and important satellites. "Their direct costs and the costs of losing them will by far exceed the cost of remedial activities."
Why is it always up to Europe to clean up the rest of the world's mess?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Where's Roger Wilco, space janitor, when you need him?
Finally! Some janitors that might have pay competitive with those in the NYC Public School System! Wonder if they will sub-contract their work to others as well?
How about we just attach a giant magnet to the back of space craft similar to what you'd see behind the rear or front tires of an RV to pick up road debris before it punctures the tires.
Citation: http://www.google.com/patents/US3956111
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Perhaps this is something that should have been taken seriously 30 years ago? It will take at least that long to hone the technology and pry the funding from the tightwads that only approve of pork in their districts.
And, maybe NASA should jump at this - they seem to be in search of a mission and the dollars that go with it, maybe this is it?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Sounds like a job for Andy Griffith http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_1
I'll start on it as soon as I finish this.
Those scientists just want more grants and jobs to make more money at the tax payers' expense!
This is just like global warming; a big hoax conspiracy that will spread to every greedy scientist around the world to pull the wool over everybody's eyes. But unfortunately, we only have a small industry which can't afford to fund think tanks to counter the lies of these wealthy science organizations. We may lose to this fraud and be forced into paying a "space tax" to fund the cleaning of this fake problem - putting us out of business and killing off the private space industry.
It has happened before... ;-)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
"Their direct costs and the costs of losing them will by far exceed the cost of remedial activities."
Unfortunately, logic like that doesn't work on elected officials. It will probably take a tragedy and loss of life before people pay attention to the science behind this.
So that no asshole can propose going to space to evade mankinds extinction as a good alternative .. till at least 1000yrs. have passed.
Within the meantime we should clean up our own mess(those that we built our life and and /.), the only space operations allowed shall be those to get a better understanding of the atmosphere & oceans (OFF EARTH not ALPHA PROXIMA).
Perhaps the workforce we say money can buy is better used on building a CO2 neutral, diseasefree world without the possiblity of nuclear plants running havok ..
Do you know what's similar between Japan and California ?
- devastating earthquakes
- nuclear power near the coast
- and tsunami
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/USA_Nuclear_power_plants_map.gif
The worst case scenario is a Kessler syndrome event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome. In this situation, a bad collision in low Earth orbit creates enough debris to trigger a series of collisions, each creating an expanding debris cloud. This could take most LEO satellites in a matter of days, and would render much of LEO effectively unusable for years. Part of the problem is that while there are a lot of possible orbits, the set of orbits which are both cheap to get to and practically useable is a much smaller set. And those orbits are almost precisely the orbits with a lot of debris. Right now, satellite are required to be able to move to either graveyard orbits or to be safely disposed in the atmosphere, but there are a lo of older satellites that were launched before any such requirement. And even with such plans, launches inevitably produce a few debris items with each launch, and satellites occasionally shed things. The early Delta rockets were very bad at producing a lot of debris, which contributed much of the current problem. Thee 2007 Chinese satellite test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test very much didn't help matters, and produced a massive still expanding cloud of debris. On the bright side, non-LEO orbits like geostat are still clean.
How do we ship some chineese up there to do our recycling?
Like this....only REALLY BIG!
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
It should be a high priority to collect the debris, as it is quite valuable - it takes a lot on money to get stuff into orbit, and most of the stuff is probably space worthy material.
We shouldn't think of it as junk, but as free bulding material left around.
..........FULL STOP.
If we can't manage our common sky, even with so much of the investment controlled by the elite. How can we ever hope to manage the bigger mess down here?
Well if we wouldn't have junked the shuttles, we could have used then as the earths trash trucks. Or just give the stuff a shove and burn it up in our atmosphere. Either way talking isnt going to get anything done. Just do it lol
Jack of all trades,master of none
When you know it's going to be a problem sooner or later, but you'd rather ignore it now.
space junk, energy, food, water, finances, republicans, windows xp, alcohol.
Privacy is terrorism.
Who was the fool that looked past using a laser and instead went for the 'net' or 'ballistics' options?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYZWP80opd4
I propose a giant electromagnet in orbit. Can it be solar powered? After enough junk has glommed onto it, either deorbit the whole mess or launch it at the moon. The moonfall is a better idea; then a new breed of prospectors would have a chance to reclaim the stuff.
Too bad 'space' doesn't also mean 'oceans'. If every country facing the each ocean could send 1 ship each month, and collect a mere 1 ton of plastic from the mid-atlantic and mid-pacific 'sewer', we could have all the plastic removed from the worlds oceans in as little as 50 years! Instead, the plastic continues to kill creatures by the millions. Its bad that we kill so many creatures wastefully for our needs. Its much worse that we kill so many more creatures needlessly because of our bad habits.
How about using some of Regan's star wars technology? Not to blow stuff up, but to give it a hard push with powerful lasers or xray beams. Push the small stuff into a degrading orbit to burn up in the atmosphere. It would be easier to target the small stuff like since you don't have to be close to it to give it a nudge. Once the little pieces are cleaned up, they can go after the less prevalent bigger pieces.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Probably some of the satellites have value to fix or parts. Especially the dead surveillance and intelligence satellites. Who owns salvaged satellites or parts ? Only maybe they have tamper mechanism, boom.
with NASA's current budget, there is no way we US citizens can tackle this. If they want to solve this, they need to give NASA more funding.
I wonder if anyone has looked into placing a satellite into orbit that was able to fire extremely precise mist clouds of some liquid. It would be launched either in a polar orbit or an opposite orbital direction from most satellites. It would fire the mist clouds into the path of a piece of debris and the energy imparted (~17,000 to ~34,000 MPH relative speed) on it from the mist would eventually cause it to deorbit. The best liquid for this would probably be something that remains a liquid on the dark side of the orbit, but evaporate on the light side to presumably self deorbit if it did not hit the debris in question, and of course be cheap (maybe some kind of cooking oil?). The satellite would have to have a pretty sophisticated tracking and targeting system but its probably not out of reach. The hardest thing I imagine would be to target the clouds precisely enough and make them small enough at the required distances (several miles) and speeds so that they only effect the target debris. After the satellite ran out of liquid it could either be refilled, or self deorbit by changing orientation to fire shortly before it ran out of liquid into its orbit instead of perpendicular to it.
just shoot down any satellite the Chinese send up, they've lost the right to use the shared orbital space of this earth with their irresponsible creation of horrendous debris field
Maybe some of the space junk will reflect some of the sun's light energy and reduce global warming...
How about some acknowledgement of there being a secret space program that makes the shuttles look like tinker toys, a break-away civilization that is completely separate from what we know as civilization, and that NASA is still ran by NAZI's and their descendants? We have the technology that would make problems like this vanish like taking out the weekly trash , except 1000000 times more efficient.
All signs point to Majestic/powers that be doing what they please, and if one of these debris hit earth, they will be laughing sitting in their own power network / underground bases, and the tons of other shit that has been built. (paid for by your tax dollars in black budget funds and drug dealing cia money by the way)
"Our understanding of the growing space debris problem can be compared with our understanding of the need to address Earthâ(TM)s changing climate some 20 years ago,"
So nothing will be done about it? =P
In the real world, that's a whole lot harder than it sounds. It's easy enough to get to an arbitrary LEO satellite, assuming you know its orbit well enough, but any dismantling and reusing would be extraordinarily difficult. This counts doubly for decommissioned satellites or debris which could be tumbling in some arbitrary fashion with no way to control. Plus, manufacturing in space is really really hard, as we've learned over 30 years of the Space Shuttle and 15 of the ISS. You probably need to launch lots of equipment (plus maybe a human or two, though no existing manned vehicle is up to the task) to make it work, and now you're doing much more work and spending much more money than you would just building something from scratch. And then of course here's the kicker: you've done all this work, and now (assuming you didn't leave anything new behind) you've removed one single piece of space junk. With the mass you've already needed to bring up to do your repair/retrofit, it's highly unlikely you'll have fuel to get to another object in even a very close orbit, and so you have to head home and launch another mission. And another. For every single piece of junk out there. It'd be absolutely impossible to make this work on a large enough scale to do anything about the debris problem.
Easy - deploy a battery of rocket-powered electromagnets, and another (autonomous vehicle?) to deploy nets that can snag up the rest into chunks, that way they're at least out of the way - and time may allow them to aggregate for further processing (space rotor shear?).
It's theorized that this is a possibility where collisions between space debris produce more debris and rise the likelyhood of further collisions. This would lead to a rapid feedback loop as collisions cascade. This would likely render space travel impossible for the next couple thousand years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
Experiments and other stuff
Until we have a big ass disaster because of space debris, no one will do anything except talk about it.
In case no one pays attention to Human history, we do NOT usually do anything until after someone bad has happened, then we run around like chickens with our heads cut off and remove more human rights.
Be seeing you...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(TV_series)
To follow the global warming analogy, we will soon find out that there is *of enough* space junk, since twenty years ago alarmists thought the globe was cooling.
could the metal there be reused as a moon base ? given x amount of energy has been used already to get the boosters, panels, screwdrivers etc
not sure how easy it would be to cast a net then send the stuff to the moon to be reused later on.. of course easier said then done.
But maybe you get to salvage an original Intel 8086!
And who knows what crap is flying over our heads. Bubble memory, perhaps. Soviet Z80 clones. Solar panels that were incredibly expensive and rare 15 years ago. Worn out capacitors. I guess it's worth it to some people. The other trouble is, what if you have some mission failure and end up adding to the junk pool.
Star Wars finally realized...perhaps all this space debris will act as a ICBM defense system? If not, the lasers we develop to get rid of the space debris will develop into the 'star wars' dream.
so many cataclysmic disaster movies about asteroids, comets, solar flares, zombie apocalypse, etc. that cause the fall of civilization. imagine all of our communications and gps satellites being knocked out by a series of space debris collisions. so many little empires laid waste by trash in space.
how much space debris would it take to cause 'global cooling'? how much would it take to protect us from a strong and direct CME?
Not necessarily for altruistic reasons, but you could probably convince some country's defense department that developing technology that can remove debris from orbit would be useful. It would help if, when explaining this to them, you put 'debris' in quotes....
This I don't believe: "Our understanding of the growing space debris problem can be compared with our understanding of the need to address Earth’s changing climate some 20 years ago,"
I don't believe in Man Made Space Debris. It's naturally occurring, it will not cause any harm to humans or cute animals or the environment. This is just a scam to enrich a small number of researchers (we should demand to see their emails!) and promote a no-growth ideology: read: they think that anything resembling a decent standard of living is evil, and with to inflict us all back to the era of hunter gatherers, although the society the envision would be matriarchal hunter gatherers.
If they really believed this non-sense, then let them leave. The earth, that is.
Let make a stable black hole in orbit. The more debris it draws in, the more debris it will attract. Eventually, it will even solve the global pollution problem as well. Win-Win.
Do not give that which is holy to dogs, and cast not your pearls before swine. SF is way too good for the average illiterate student.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Solution seems very simple. We wait for the coming of the great white hanky and it will all get cleaned up at once.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)