Space may be incomprehensibly vast, but Earth’s environs are crowded with junk. Spent rockets, derelict spacecraft, satellite fragments and loose hardware now form a cloud of debris that poses a threat to orbiting satellites and astronauts. Sky watchers have catalogued more than 16,000 objects larger than about 10 centimeters, most of them in low Earth orbit, at altitudes of 200 to 2,000 kilometers.
And the junk is self-sustaining. If humankind were to cease all spacefaring activities, the hardware we have already cast off would continue to collide and fragment into bits for centuries. Maintaining current launch rates would make the problem even worse. The number of space objects has shot up in the past five years because of China’s 2007 test of an antisatellite weapon and the 2009 crash between Russian and U.S. satellites. Governments are contemplating cleanup measures but have yet to devise a workable solution.
Credit: Jan Willem Tulp, Sources: Ting Wang Stanford University (2012 debris data); J.C. Liou NASA Orbital Debris Program Office (future projections)
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Add CommentTo accelerate delay, you could add a balloon on a tether to current satelite for after useful life has ended. The wire in a tether interacts with the earths magnetic field to generate electricity and orbital drag. It could even power an ionic xenon drive to alter the orbit. The balloon would increase atmospheric drag. You could even send up a bunch of these tiny sattelites and send them to rondevous with existing sattelites and attach themselves and bring them down.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYeah, though it gets very expensive, and the worst stuff is all the tiny little bits of junk, which nobody is likely to come up with a feasible way to clean up anytime soon. A screw flying around in orbit at 8 km/sec packs enough punch to do in a satellite and there are a LARGE number of bits like this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoes anyone know, if there were a way to put an electrostatic charge on debris in orbit, would that interact with the earth's magnetic field to make their orbits decay?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHmmm...I see a privateer doing a recycle mission. After all, many of those satellite components are gold and/or other marketable materials. Anyone have a large net and an open weekend?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA magnetic net?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen space travel comes to the mass unwashed I think I'll stay here and just watch the flashes bursting in the night sky.
In view of the extremely low density of the thermosphere - see http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2010/07/15/graphs.jpg - amounting to around 10^-12kg per cubic meter - perhaps it would be possible to inject gas into the atmosphere at this level? One could envisage launching a few 100kgs of frozen gas into a retrograde orbit. The gas then sublimates and forms a gas cloud that gradually disperses. The orbital decay effect would be strongest for smaller debris but would have little effect on larger satellites.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAny time debris is detected in a low-relative-velocity orbit and a working satellite has to dodge it, seems like having a light net on an elastic tether to catch it would be worthwhile, maybe to reuse some of the materials. Maybe even to shoot the net out and catch debris it doesn't have to dodge. Yes, it would change the satellite's orbit somewhat, which is true every time it has to dodge.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis makes me wonder if maybe someone has nuclear missiles in space, to perhaps be brought down and scattered by some errant debris.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWALL-E is the solution.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRoomBa robotics in space -