Slashdot Mirror
Space Junk Successfully Captured In Orbit For the First Time (with Video) (surrey.ac.uk)
"The Surrey Space Center successfully used a net to capture a piece of artificial space junk in orbit for the first time in history on Sunday," writes Slashdot reader dmoberhaus. "The video was just released Wednesday and is quite stunning."
"Not only does the net look cool as hell, it's addressing a major problem for the future of space exploration," reports Motherboard: The test was carried about by the RemoveDEBRIS satellite, an experimental space debris removal platform built by an international consortium of space companies and university research centers. There are tens of thousands of pieces of fast-moving space junk in orbit, which range from the centimeter-scale all the way to entire rocket stages. Some of these pieces are moving faster than a bullet and all of them pose a serious danger to other satellites and crewed capsules... Removing this junk from orbit is particularly challenging because of the various sizes of the debris, its erratic tumbling motion, and the fact that some pieces are moving as fast as 30,000 miles per hour.
The successful experiment follows six years of Earth-based testing, according to a professor at the lead research institution, the Surrey Space Centre.
"While it might sound like a simple idea, the complexity of using a net in space to capture a piece of debris took many years of planning, engineering and coordination."
"Not only does the net look cool as hell, it's addressing a major problem for the future of space exploration," reports Motherboard: The test was carried about by the RemoveDEBRIS satellite, an experimental space debris removal platform built by an international consortium of space companies and university research centers. There are tens of thousands of pieces of fast-moving space junk in orbit, which range from the centimeter-scale all the way to entire rocket stages. Some of these pieces are moving faster than a bullet and all of them pose a serious danger to other satellites and crewed capsules... Removing this junk from orbit is particularly challenging because of the various sizes of the debris, its erratic tumbling motion, and the fact that some pieces are moving as fast as 30,000 miles per hour.
The successful experiment follows six years of Earth-based testing, according to a professor at the lead research institution, the Surrey Space Centre.
"While it might sound like a simple idea, the complexity of using a net in space to capture a piece of debris took many years of planning, engineering and coordination."
Fuck yeah
But now what? Looks like they just added to the mass of the trash.
We need better language to discuss these things in the lay media. Or maybe use the language we have better.
Yeah it sounds awesome and scary to say "moving as fast as 30,000 miles per hour!" (gasp) but relative to what? If I am in the same orbit it is moving as "slow as 0 miles per hour!" But that isn't scary enough to say.
What I would like to have heard is some sort of detail about what types of launches and deployments are at risk. Maybe list desirable orbits that would be problematic. But of course that kind of copy also isn't scary enough (gasp) so I guess it is too much to ask for.
That said this is a great achievement and yes it is only a matter of time before space debris causes some catastrophe. Mitigating the risk is well worth the expense. Maybe that's something that Trump's "Space Force" can focus on.
And the rest of the world has to fix it....
https://a.disquscdn.com/get?ur...
Red Dwarf
They deployed a target for their capture device test. It wasn't found space junk.
At this rate we'll be done in 3657 CE.
Has anyone tried ionization?
This wasn't even a piece of space junk - it was a object purposely made and launched from the mother satellite. This reduces the complexity by major factors: 1) this junk was of the perfect size and shape to be captured by the net 2) it was nearly matched in speed to the capture net 3) it was at nearly the same velocity (speed and directly) 4) it was in the exact effing orbit. 5) The resulting combination then slowly de-orbits, using up all the equipment.
This means that you have to have one of these gizmos for each piece of junk. If you boost several gizmos at once with one mothership that has all the maneuvering capability, you're going to use up lots of maneuvering fuel to match orbits with each object. If you boost each gizmo separately, you'll need even more boost fuel.
Presumably the same technology can be scaled to bring down the other guy's satellites, too.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Does it orbit the earth until it snags a real satellite?
They did that on Firefly
Something close to 100% of them.
This is an achievement, but we have harder challenges to solve: remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and remove plastics from the oceans.
But have you ever been able to successfully capture your junk?
Ezekiel 23:20
Here's a link to the Wikipedia page about it.
An huge ion-thrusted orbitting angled thick metal panel is enough to plough the oubit sent all the derbis back to earth.
What, them Chinese is sailing junks in space too? I seen 'em in the Gulf of Tonkin, but getting them into space...that's a wow.
It looks more economical for this to be used to capture an "enemy" satellite than capture the myriad of metallic shrapnel in orbit.
From the video it looks like the net began to collapse and almost missed the "debris". Why they didn't introduce a rotation in the net (kind of like a bola) to give it a bit of inherent tension and stability I can't understand. Also I'm not quite sure of the effectiveness of their drag chute idea as most debris are located above 500km where atmospheric drag is pretty low no matter what your surface area is. You might be better off either rigging some kind of electrodynamic tether system (assuming you could make it extremely small/simple) or just retracting the debris back to some kind of storage basket on the satellite and holding on to it until you've collected a dozen or so debris and then deorbiting the whole thing.
To shoot this stuff out of orbit.
I wonder how much space junk is "space poo" from the ISS, etc?
It's anonymous cowards, all the way down.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
It's hard to watch the end of that video without thinking, "now what?".
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Well she was walking all alone ....
Down the street in the alley
Her name was Sally
I never touched her, she never saw it
When she was hit by space junk
When she was hit by space junk
When she was hit by space junk