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Space Junk-Fighting Cable Fails To Deploy (newscientist.com)
New Scientist reports:
It's a rubbish start for the world's first space clean-up experiment. A cable designed to drag space junk out of orbit has failed to deploy from a Japanese spacecraft... A 700-metre-long metal cable was fitted to an unmanned spacecraft called Kounotori 6, which was on its way back to Earth after delivering supplies to the International Space Station. The cable was meant to unfurl from the spacecraft, at which point an electric current would pass along its length. The idea was that the current would interact with the Earth's magnetic field, creating a drag that pulled the spacecraft out of orbit. The spacecraft would then tumble into our atmosphere and become incinerated... However, Kounotori 6 was unable to release the cable to test its junk-removing potential, and JAXA could not fix the glitch before the spacecraft returned to Earth's atmosphere this morning... "Releasing a cable may seem simple, but nothing in space is simple," says Sean Tuttle at the University of New South Wales in Australia... The test's failure should be seen as a setback rather than a nail in the coffin for junk-removing cables, Tuttle says.
rickyslashdot writes: Because of the simplicity of this system, it is bound to be tested again -- hopefully sooner than later... This process is inherently safer than using rocket engines (to be attached to the junk), and is much less of a 'mass-to-orbit' cost, since it only requires a grappling system, and a spool of wire/cable. Hopefully, there will be a follow-up / re-try in the near future for this orbital debris clean-up process.
rickyslashdot writes: Because of the simplicity of this system, it is bound to be tested again -- hopefully sooner than later... This process is inherently safer than using rocket engines (to be attached to the junk), and is much less of a 'mass-to-orbit' cost, since it only requires a grappling system, and a spool of wire/cable. Hopefully, there will be a follow-up / re-try in the near future for this orbital debris clean-up process.
This idea has been investigated and it has multiple serious problems. The most serious problem is that space junk is frequently moving very fast so rather than catch things one is much more likely to tear or pierce your web.
Spider web... spider web... does whatever spider web does. Can it grab junk from space ? No it can't, it's too weak. Look out! It's a spider web!
Being Slashdot, we could use parentheses instead:
((space junk) fighting) cable = "a cable that fights space-junk"
(space junk) (fighting cable) = "a fighting-cable that is space-junk"
(space (junk fighting)) cable = "a space-ready cable intended for fighting junk"
space (junk (fighting cable)) = "a broken fighting-cable found in space
space ((junk fighting) cable) = "a TV cable channel showing junk-fighting tournaments that is broadcast to space"
I had to struggle with some of those...
So... Basically, they just added more junk.
Thanks, I think your use of parentheses makes it very clear what's wrong. The headline is conveying example #3, when it was trying to go for example #1.
Every summary of this story I have seen completely misunderstands what this technology is for.
This is NOT intended to deal with the problem of existing space junk. This is a cheap/light widget you can add to FUTURE satellites which will allow them to de-orbit in a timely fashion, thus reducing future space junk.
It should also be noted that the Kounotori 6 spacecraft was already on a decaying orbit when the cable was meant to deploy, so no additional space junk was created by the failure.
Hey, dude; we're wise to your kind!
Won't work. My bedroom has lots of spider webs and its still full of junk.
Have gnu, will travel.
I was about to get me knickers all bunched up over this, and similar issues, until I read a former editor (the great Rob Malda himself) state what pretty much summed up the utter lack of editorship in Slashdot. It's in the FAQ linked down there at the bottom; I find it relatable to suspension of disbelief. At the moment though, we're the junk fighters, holding out our hand to try and stop the assault, with the hyphens and dashes suspended in mid-air
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I've been flamed for pointing out that we've never smelted metal in space and that all of our smelting furnaces are designed to operate in an atmosphere and with gravity, and with large amounts of direct manual labor.
People seem to think that somehow redesigning these processes and equipment for near-vacuum microgravity will be no issue. I strongly suspect these people have no idea what they're talking about or have read far too much of Kim Stanley Robinson's work and assume that it's hard-scifi.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
That's the only conclusion I can draw by the way space designers keep turning to them no matter how often they bollux things up. Tethers must be the astronautical equivalent of an abusive boyfriend.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In this case, it's a junk junk-fighting cable.
Anyone who thinks it's easy to do complicated things in space isn't really worth the effort to argue with. As it turns out, just about *everything* done in space has a huge host of unique challenges and hurdles to overcome. I'm pretty confident that we'll eventually be smelting in space, as that's the logical way to bootstrap massive in-space construction projects, but I'd imagine we're basically going to have to completely re-invent the technology for automation and zero-G environments.
I've found that when someone starts a phrase with "All you have to do is..." (or other arrogantly dismissive phrase), 9 times out of 10 they haven't a clue how involved some of those processes are, or what circumstantial complications prevent a "simple" back-of-the-napkin solution. If you happen to have deep knowledge in a specific field or speciality, and then hear Slashdotters talking about it, it's invariably face-palm frustrating at the wrong assumptions made. It's happened often enough to me, so that I generally assume that's true of most other fields as well.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Actually, if "space junk" is understood to be a single term without hyphenation (as you argued), then the single hyphen is at least acceptable. Technically, it would probably be best to say "space-junk-fighting cable" to be completely clear since all three words are necessary for the concept. However, "space junk fighting cable" is the most incorrect of all these options, as "fighting," "space," and "junk" each are nonsensical as independent adjectives applied to "cable" without all of the others also present.
If you want to nitpick fine, if one can find asteroids with nice solid metal cores then you're right, you don't have to smelt in order to have useful material. You'll still have to use some kind of furnace process to turn that base iron into something besides base iron though, so you still have to get raw materials to the worksite and you still have to work out how exactly to go about consistently formulating steel in that environment, and you have to figure out how to shape that steel as it cools.
Right now we have to overcome a disadvantage in the form of atmospheric contamination when making steel on Earth, but we gain an advantage in using gravity to manipulate materials to transport from one part of the steel mill to another and to create final products. Or do you just propose to manufacture roughly spherical blobs of metal and leave it at that?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Right now we have to overcome a disadvantage in the form of atmospheric contamination when making steel on Earth, but we gain an advantage in using gravity to manipulate materials to transport from one part of the steel mill to another and to create final products. Or do you just propose to manufacture roughly spherical blobs of metal and leave it at that?
I think one hope is that we'll learn how to build foam steel, which can in theory be made in space — indeed, it may only be possible to make it there. Even if all we could do was make big extrusions out of it, it would be exceptionally useful for building stuff in space.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Smelting is typically the act of reducing a metal oxide to get metal.
Some of the asteroids have metal in an unoxidized state so that makes the mineral processing a bit easier, or at least removes a step.
I've mentioned this here before, but some (maybe rare but at least one has been found) are in a state where all you have to do is forge the thing you want out of a bit of metallic asteroid. The "sky iron" in fantasy stories is based on things like Tutenkamen's dagger which was forged from part of a meteorite.
I should add, in case some readers don't know, is that forging is just heating a piece of metal up until it is soft enough to work and then hammering it into the shape you want. Think of making horseshoes which you've probably seen on TV if not in real life.
Forging in space would not be trivial but it's easier than melting stuff and a hell of a lot easier than getting metal combined with something else out of an ore.
I can't see any of the above happening until there is a moonbase. A furnace on a space station is a bit of a risk while one in a separate building at a moonbase is less likely to kill everyone around.
Indeed. I just had a discussion with someone who seemed to think that a steampunk hydraulic robot is something that can be put together in an afternoon instead of a project of years with a string of inventions over those years to get it to the point where electronic robots are.
True, currently exotic or unattainable materials may be able to be manufactured in microgravity or vacuum or some combination thereof. Unfortunately only expensive experimentation will establish what can be fabricated in space and at what cost. For all we know, manufacturing foam metals in huge blocks or somewhat amorphous blobs and then cutting them into shapes similarly to how a sawmill reduces trees to boards might be cheaper than producing rolled solid steel. We'll just have to see.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Being Slashdot, "Japanese space tentacle" would be clear for everyone.