Space Junk Getting Worse 242
HockeyPuck writes "According to Space.com the amount of space junk is getting worse. 'A head-on collision was averted between a spent upper stage from a Chinese rocket and the European Space Agency's (ESA) huge Envisat Earth remote-sensing spacecraft. [...] But what if the two objects had tangled? Such a space collision would have caused mayhem in the heavens, adding clutter to an orbit altitude where there are big problems already, said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the European Space Agency's Space Debris Office in Darmstadt, Germany."
Push them further away (Score:3, Interesting)
When you abandon satellite, fuel tanks or anything else in the space, why not just push it floating further away in space? Let some aliens take care of them.
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Right? Didn't anyone watch Superman 4?
Re:Push them further away (Score:4, Funny)
That wouldn't take much fuel or anything...
Re:Push them further away (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we please never hear this idea ever again? Every time a hard waste disposal problem comes up, someone suggests throwing the nuclear waste, or decaying space debris into the sun.
Throwing something into the sun would require a truly staggering amount of energy. It will never be a practical means of waste disposal.
Re:Push them further away (Score:5, Informative)
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I probably am) but don't you GAIN speed as you fall into the sun's gravity well?
Yes, and if we could just set the space junk in space with no momentum, the sun's gravity would be all we need.
But any space junk launched from earth is starting with a solar orbital velocity of ~30km/s. Redirecting a rocket from that orbit into one that intersects the sun takes a lot of energy.
Re:Push them further away (Score:4, Insightful)
You're already in the sun's gravity well. And every little bit of matter in your body has been happily falling into the sun for 5 billion years.
Orbiting is very much like flying in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: it's the art of falling towards a celestial body with enough speed that you miss it every time. You want to hit the sun? You've got to slow yourself down by about 60,000mph, otherwise you're just going to keep missing it every time.
It's only slightly harder to fling yourself out of the solar system than it is to hit the sun and we've only managed that five times, I think.
Re:Push them further away (Score:5, Funny)
We should start sending all our garbage there.
I agree, but how will we convince all 535 members of Congress to get on the space ship?
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Promise them money for their district. It isn't like their actions aren't easily bought.
Re:Push them further away (Score:4, Funny)
I suggest we create a fleet of Ark ships. Elected officials get on Ark Ship #2.
Brett
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Because that takes fuel, whether to push them into a higher orbit or a lower one (say to disintegrate on reentry).
Re:Push them further away (Score:5, Informative)
I think they normally push them into an orbit that will degrade so that they'll burn up on reentry. That takes less energy than putting them on a trajectory that leaves Earth's orbit.
The real problem is junk that doesn't have working thrusters and communications so that they can tell it to de-orbit.
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There's a movie there somewhere, I know it!
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Joel was a janitor in space. Roger Wilco, on the other hand, was a space janitor. Subtle, I know.
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I think they normally push them into an orbit that will degrade so that they'll burn up on reentry. That takes less energy than putting them on a trajectory that leaves Earth's orbit.
For those lofty orbits in prime real estate (think Geosynchronous), they do push satellites out further into a graveyard orbit. It would take about 1500 m/s deltav to deorbit from way up there, and only a fraction of that to just push it a little further out of the way.
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The real problem is junk that doesn't have working thrusters and communications so that they can tell it to de-orbit.
If the missile defense lasers ever become viable weapons, they might be used to ablate space junk in such a way as to change its orbit.
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Or vaporize it with a very powerful laser. Something like this [stardestroyer.net], maybe.
Re:Push them further away (Score:5, Informative)
When you abandon satellite, fuel tanks or anything else in the space, why not just push it floating further away in space? Let some aliens take care of them.
It takes energy to send a satellite up into a higher orbit, and even more to push it out of Earth orbit entirely...
For that matter it also takes energy to shift a satellite to a lower orbit, too. About the only thing you get for free is atmospheric drag, and then only once your satellite is already low enough to run into the upper atmosphere.
To give a satellite the ability to do any of these things, it must carry its own rocket motors and fuel - this increases the satellite's launch-weight, which in turn increases the fuel requirements of the booster.
Re:Push them further away (Score:4, Funny)
Exactly, so we should build a gigantic ground based laser that can vaporize a school bus sized object in 1/4 a second. I want the beam to be 30 feet wide and blackout every city in a hemisphere when it fires. Heck make it powerful enough that it adjusts the earth's orbit due to the amount of photos being fired.
Plus we can use it when the aliens get here all pissed off that we are cluttering up the lower EM spectrum with a lot of useless chatter.
Re:Push them further away (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sure how serious you're being, but a laser could be used without needing to vaporize the entire object. A laser broom [wikipedia.org] works by vaporizing just a small part of the object to create thrust and knock the object out of orbit.
The laser broom is intended to be used at high enough power to punch through the atmosphere with enough remaining power to ablate material from the debris for several minutes. This would provide thrust to alter its orbit, dropping the perigee into the upper atmosphere, increasing drag so that the debris would eventually burn up on reentry.
Re:Push them further away (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, a rocket motor and fuel is not required. A cheap, easy, and--I hate to use this word, but--"free" form of orbital propulsion exists. Electrodynamic tether propulsion [wikipedia.org]. Extend a conducting wire out from the spacecraft, and as it moves through the Earth's magnetic field, it can act as a motor or a brake like a normal electric motor. No fuel required.
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Unless it takes up zero volume and zero mass, then it's not free.
On top of which, the claim that it 'exists' is a shaky one, as while tethers are theoretically simple they've proven very hard to implement in practice. They're a long way from being proven technology and ready for prime time. Tethers also have significant draw
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Someone correct me if I'm wrong (no, seriously, I'd like to know), but couldn't solar-powered gyroscopic thrust be cheaply incorporated into every launched satellite and be activated once the satellite's mission has expired and the satellite is no longer needed?
"gyroscopic thrust"???
Gyros can be used to *rotate* an object in orbit, but unless they rewrote the laws of physics since I went to school there's no way to get "thrust" out of one.
or pull them back (Score:2)
and reuse or recycle the parts.
Re:or pull them back (Score:5, Funny)
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They tried something similar to this in Futurama. Didn't go so well.
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Because Earth orbit is not zero gravity, it's freefall. Moving into a wider orbit takes thrust to counteract Earth's gravity, which is still considerable.
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Because they don't have a space trucker with unlimited fuel to do that.
It's far easier to use the last of the fuel to decay the orbit and crash it to earth than design the satellite to be 80X larger so it has giant fuel tanks and a big engine to get it to escape velocity.
Re:Push them further away (Score:5, Informative)
Really, the big problem with the current space junk comes from orbital bodies that are decades old. Before things were regulated heavily in orbital operations, many satellite were just left to decay and breakup in orbit. As a result, we have a lot of detached thermal blankets and other clutter drifting around up there. There is also a large contribution that comes from nations which do not follow modern disposal regulations. The article mentions that China is one of these nations. There are others (such as Iran) but they are not contributing a whole lot because many space programs are still small.
When it comes down to it, spacecraft disposal is a responsibility just like terrestrial recycling. The responsible thing to do is pay more and dispose of things correctly. Unfortunately, we didn't plan ahead from the get go and some people just prefer cutting corners.
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For the same reason we don't "just push" things into orbit.
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When you abandon satellite, fuel tanks or anything else in the space, why not just push it floating further away in space? Let some aliens [slashdot.org] take care of them.
Why should the foreigners have all the fun? And rather than pushing them into space, do what has been done for years -- push it towards earth and let it burn up in the atmosphere. Ten or so years ago I saw a remarkable a spectacular bright green shooting star, which I found out a few days later was a piece of space junk with a lot of copper the Russians
Options (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder why this issue hasn't been fixed by now.
I can come up with quite a few ways that we could remove space junk, most aren't very good, but there is one I think would work the best.
Launch a couple satellites with solid state lasers. Heat up the side of the space junk facing earth and let the laser push it into the atmosphere.
Plus if you have a few dozen up there you could perhaps deflect larger objects, yet they would be useless if you wanted to shoot a target on the surface of the Earth.
There has to be a reason that there has been next to no attempt to control the space junk issue, I guess getting funding to clean up orbits is hard to come by.
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Where ya gonna get the energy for this [dr_evil_quotes]"laser"[/dr_evil_quotes]?
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Solar panels.
We're not talking a very powerful laser here, it doesn't have to be.
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There have been weapons in space before. Satellites have more to fear against ground based attacks than they would for a small scale laser in orbit.
Re:Options (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder why this issue hasn't been fixed by now.
I can come up with quite a few ways that we could remove space junk, most aren't very good, but there is one I think would work the best.
Launch a couple satellites with solid state lasers. Heat up the side of the space junk facing earth and let the laser push it into the atmosphere.
Plus if you have a few dozen up there you could perhaps deflect larger objects, yet they would be useless if you wanted to shoot a target on the surface of the Earth.
There has to be a reason that there has been next to no attempt to control the space junk issue, I guess getting funding to clean up orbits is hard to come by.
There will be no concerted effort to remove space junk until the risk of collision with space junk rises to the point that it costs less to remove the junk than to risk being hit by it.
It could be that this is some important idea in physics I simply don't understand... But how does a laser push an object into the atmosphere? What good does heating up one side of it do? How powerful of a laser do you need to significantly alter the trajectory of a piece of space debris? And how do you heat up one side of it if the object is spinning? (Which it almost surely is...) What happens if the laser misses? And if the object you're shooting at doesn't give off a diffuse reflection, how do you know if you hit or missed?
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It could be that this is some important idea in physics I simply don't understand... But how does a laser push an object into the atmosphere?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_pressure [wikipedia.org]
Plus if you can ablate material you'll get thrust from that.
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But how does a laser push an object into the atmosphere? What good does heating up one side of it do?
Photons carry momentum. Not much, but they do. So, the laser itself can push the object. Heating one side so it emits more photons would push it as well. If it's spinning that's not much use, but the laser would still impart momentum.
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If you have enough energy to 'boil' the surface of the object (low pressure makes this easier but not trivial), then the local pressure difference is a differential force on the object. In this way, the laser appears to push an object in space.
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A satellite such as you describe would be both tremendously expensive, and (quite justifiably) regarded as a weapon. And dealing with the amount of junk currently in LEO, we'd need not one such satellite, but a lot of them. There's also the problem of what counts as junk -- the US, Russia, and China certainly, and several other nations probably, have a number of satellites that have no public record of their existence, but which are very much active and functional. If anything the garbage-sweeping satell
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If anything the garbage-sweeping satellite doesn't have in its database is classified as "junk" and destroyed, it would end up taking these satellites down, and the owners might get ... testy.
Then have it work off of a white list of approved junk.
Besides, I'm talking about something for knocking the little bits and pieces out of orbit, it would take quite a big hit or multiple lasers to knock a black ops satellite out of orbit.
Re:Options (Score:4, Informative)
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_junk [wikipedia.org])
Launch a couple satellites with solid state lasers. Heat up the side of the space junk facing earth and let the laser push it into the atmosphere.
Plus if you have a few dozen up there you could perhaps deflect larger objects, yet they would be useless if you wanted to shoot a target on the surface of the Earth.
There has to be a reason that there has been next to no attempt to control the space junk issue, I guess getting funding to clean up orbits is hard to come by.
How are you going to "push" objects that cross your orbit with 10 km/s?
They have some solutions on wikipedia:
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10 km/s in freefall in vacuum shouldn't be too hard, and you can lock on the laser at a small lasing power and then pulse it while on target.
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Launch a couple satellites with solid state lasers. Heat up the side of the space junk facing earth and let the laser push it into the atmosphere.
So far as I understand, lasers require a large amount of energy to produce an appreciable amount of heat. That energy has to come from somewhere, like large solar panels. Large solar panels (or other large power sources) add mass and moment arms to your spacecraft. This requires a complex control system (reaction control wheels and computers) to damp out possible perturbations and maintain an accurate pointing of the spacecraft (crucial if you are going to be shooting high powered lasers at anything). A co
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Just keep the laser on the ground and use adaptive optics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics [wikipedia.org] so that it remains coherent up to the junk you're trying to get rid of. You don't have to change the orbit much, just enough to drop the Perigree into the upper atmosphere which can be done by pushing the junk straight upward away from the Earth. It's called a Laser Broom, they've been talking about it to protect the ISS from debris for a while now but there's no reason it couldn't be applied to the larg
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Umm, if you turn a laser onto the side of the space junk facing Earth, the laser will push it away from Earth, not toward Earth.
If you want to make it hit atmosphere, you want to push the leading edge of the junk, which will drive it into a lower orbit, and eventually into atmosphere.
Note, by the way, that we have a Treaty forbidding the weaponization of space (
Is it any wonder that junk in space is a problem? (Score:2)
If you think about it - with those crazy toilet systems and the fact that you're always trapped in those confining suits - really I think it's to be expected that space junk would be pretty awful.
Perhaps.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Perhaps.. (Score:4, Funny)
Who cares... (Score:2, Insightful)
The area of space immediately around the globe (Score:2)
One would hope
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The odds of guessing your birthday correctly is roughly 1:365. That's dismal odds. The odds of picking the birthday of somebody in your household is slightly higher, because everyone in your family probably has a different day for their birthday; however, it's really really unlikely (barring twins) for there to be a COLLISION where two people share the sam
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So what you're saying is, it won't happen to MY satellite, but I'll probably hear about it happening to somebody else's satellite.
That doesn't really sound like a big problem...
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Applying the birthday problem to this only makes sense if you are considering the chances of space junk hitting anything else, including other space junk. We don't care if space junk hits space junk, we only care if space junk hits astronauts. (in other words, we only care if the space junk has the same birthday as the astronauts, not if space junk and space junk share the same birthday.)
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*Any* problem like this would be disastrous due to the Kessler Syndrome [wikipedia.org].
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True, however, there aren't many orbits that are useful (which you mention). Geosynchronous orbit, for example, is at a very specific altitude and speed. Put to much junk in that orbit or into an orbit that ends up passing through it and you have the potential to shut down all traffic in that orbit.
That's just one example.
You also have to understand the immense speeds things travel up there. Most of these items are traveling at faster than bullet speeds (6867+ mph for Geo Sync if my source is correct).
Po
I thought space was a vacuum (Score:3, Funny)
So why don't they just use it and clean up?
A head-on collision? (Score:2)
When an unmanned satellite nearly hits an ejected rocket stage... what exactly counts as a head-on collision? Would it be safer if it was side-impact?
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Considering orbital velocities. a single 1/8th inch ball bearing would rip through a Military armored humvee like it was tissue paper. so a booster stage.... would turn both objects into several hundreds of thousands 1/8th inch to 2 inch sized jagged particles and pieces that are all now going to spread out and turn into a satellite death cloud.
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I really doubt that Chinese rocket was in a polar orbit, so this would be side-impact collision. But no it would make no difference at all to the total destruction of the satellite.
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"what exactly counts as a head-on collision?"
Direction of travel, one would imagine.
"Would it be safer if it was side-impact?"
In that less of the relative kinetic energy between the two bodies would be spent breaking them into smaller pieces, I suppose it might be marginally safer. That's a far cry from saying that it would be "safe", though.
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I never even took high school physics, but show me a two-body collision in which the direction of travel was not "toward each other"...
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Would it be safer if it was side-impact?
No. Orbital velocities result in extremely high kinetic energies. Any collision is likely to be catastrophic.
how to fight the next world war. (Score:2)
I always thought that with terrorists becoming the next mortal enemy the best way for an to fight woudl be to shoot a few rockets filled with #4 ball bearings into space. You kill communication (comm sat), mapping(GPS), and intelligence (spy sat), and force them to fight man to man.
We need a recyling center (Score:5, Interesting)
If something weighs 3 tons and is in orbit, someone should be able to take it up to the space station, bolt it down, and start wielding the holes shut.
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As might be imagined, smaller items are more numerous.
Space debris [wikipedia.org]: The current equipment used to gather such information is only capable of tracking objects down to about 5 centimetres (2.0 in) diameter in low Earth orbit, and about 50 centimetres (20 in) in geosynchronous orbit. Out of the estimated 600,000 objects above 1 centimetre (0.39 in) diameter, only 19,000 can be tracked as of today.
Responsible (Score:2)
As more and more of it piles up, I wonder, would they be legally responsible for their space junk and the damage it causes? When I was young and left toys out on the floor, I got in trouble whenever anyone stepped on it. Now older, if I left some nails on the road, surely someone would come looking for me.
This is a job for! (Score:2)
Roger Wilco, SPAAAAACE JANITOR!
Really though - make a fund to fund the development of a janitor robot. Something small, light and cheap that can attach to junk, then lob it at other junk to destabilize the junk orbit while maintaining its own orbit. The folks working on "Star Wars" projects would already be there on several aspects.
Ryan Fenton
Tangled? (Score:2)
Air Force Commercial (Score:2)
Why not just maneuver out of the way like in that ridiculous Air Force commercial?
Step 1: Ban space weapons (Score:5, Insightful)
How? (Score:2)
Any nuclear armed country that wants to blow stuff up in space (whether to test satellite killing weapons, or just to grief the rest of humanity) is going to be able to do so.
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there is no space junk "problem" (Score:5, Funny)
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Did anyone else imagine... (Score:2)
...a giant penis in space, lacking a giant vagina? ;)
“Tangling” of those two objects might be exactly what we need. ;)
But what if the two objects had tangled? (Score:2)
Rfits (Score:2)
Has to me mentioned in the Rifts RPG at some point in the war someone launched effectively frag missles that turned everything in orbit into a high speed shredder locking out anyone off Earth and locking in everything on Earth. What it to prevent some lunatic rogue (yeah no makeup here!) nation from doing the same?
We need more funding for space elevators (Score:2)
Nuclear... (Score:2)
Several high yield nuclear warheads launched to detonate simultaneously at a uniform high altitude, spread equally around the globe an equal distance around the globe to vaporize all the space junk in the upper atmosphere. No more space junk. What could possibly go wrong?
ghetto dyson sphere (Score:2)
What I want to know is how much junk can we orbit before we have to start calling it a dyson sphere?
Ablation Cascade (Score:3, Informative)
Trailer Trash (Score:2)
Ya? Just wait til we put the Space Shuttle on blocks on our front lawn...
Then the Universe will know just what kind of neighborhood we have over here.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Time to send up Quark! (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like it is time an outerspace garbage man.
Where can I apply for that job?
I hear Technora Corp is putting together some kind of department for this...
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Vacuum Cleaners, Inc.
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http://www.kumby.com/planetes-episode-1/ [kumby.com]
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