Evolution Update: Heavy Breathing in an Early Ear

[Digitonomy]

Satellite debris continues to be a problem, and the article points out that even without new launches, the numbers will continue to increase as current debris collides and breaks into more pieces.

nytimes.com/2006/01/24/science/24obox.html

Crash Course

The space age has spawned a lot of things - global communications, precise weather forecasts and Tang, to name a few - but it has also generated a lot of junk. More than 11 million pounds of orbital debris are now being tracked, including old satellites, pieces of exploded rockets and smaller items like astronaut gloves.

All that space junk poses a collision threat to current and future space missions, manned or robotic, government or commercial. And just about every new launching adds more debris…

The NASA scientists say that suggested methods of disposing of the junk - by attaching tethers to fragments, for example, to increase drag and speed up orbital decay - are not economically feasible. New, cheaper technologies are needed, they say.

I haven’t heard of any way to clean up what is already there, just ways to protect satellites from it.

 

[geezerbob]

I didn’t read the entire article, but tethers work to increase drag only in an atmosphere. In space, they would simply add to the debris.

 

[Digitonomy]

geezerbob:

I didn’t read the entire article, but tethers work to increase drag only in an atmosphere. In space, they would simply add to the debris.

My thought is they might add to the total debris, but successful tethers could keep the whole mass together. The collective debris would therefore have a lower velocity than many of the bits would otherwise, and lower velocity means a quicker burn up in the atmosphere.

However, I just looked this up on the internet, and it appears that this company atleast has e a different conception of how tethers work, keeping the tether attached to the satellite until its service life ended, then deploying it:

The Terminator Tether™ is a small device that uses electrodynamic tether drag to deorbit a spacecraft. Because it uses passive electromagnetic interactions with the Earth’s magnetic field to lower the orbit of the spacecraft, it requires neither propellant nor power. Thus it can achieve autonomous deorbit of a spacecraft with very low mass requirements.

This doesn’t appear to address the smaller debris from the booster that falls away.

 

[Lance]

Lets clean up the debris in New Orleans and other places hit by natural disaters before we start worrying about space.