Space
junk is becoming more of a problem on a daily basis. It is not necessarily that a new satellite or part of its
launch system is added each day, it's that there is so much junk floating around up there now that collisions
between existing components are continually creating new junk. In fact, if you look at the chart to the right that
appeared in the April 2012 edition of Scientific American ("Space
Age Wasteland: Debris in Orbit Is Here to Stay"), you will see that the multiplication effect will
continue to produce more space junk even if all new launches are halted immediately (the
lower line). The upper line extrapolates growth of space junk at the current rate of satellite launches. Of
course the dots shown are not in scale to the volume of space represented, but we know empirically that collisions
occur frequently.
The
North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) puts a lot of
work into tracking space debris in order to predict reentry hazards, orbital collisions, and to be able to
differentiate between benign projectiles and hostile military projectiles. We hear a couple times a year about the
need to adjust the orbit of the International Space Station in order to avoid potential collisions with orbiting
space junk. Back when the U.S. wasn't a 3rd-world nation from the manned space program perspective, the Shuttle
often changed orbit to avoid man-made objects. With an orbital speed of around 18,000 mph, even a small chunk of
busted former antenna or attitude control nozzle could rip right through the spacecraft.
Space debris that
is just left over from abandoned satellites and their launch systems is bad enough, but a couple years ago the
Chinese created thousands of chunks of junk when they tested a space weapon on their own
Fengyun-1C satellite. In 2009, a Russian accidently (ostensibly) collided with an
Iridium satellite
and created a pile of new debris. According to a story by
Discover, China is responsible for 40% of all space junk even though they have been relative newcomers to the
realm. The U.S. produced 27.5% and Russia produced 25.5%.
To help mitigate the problem, engineers and
scientists at the Swiss Space Center at EPFL recently launched the "CleanSpace
One" project. The aim is to design and build a satellite that will chase, grab and destroy space debris,
primarily one of the first Swiss satellites, Swisscube-1
or
TIsat-1. The plan is to hurl the objects into a much
lower orbit so that it will quickly degrade and reenter the Earth's atmosphere and burn up. It will be interesting
to see what they come up with for a propulsion system that is sufficient to service many objects before having to
commit cosmological suicide by intentionally subjecting itself to a fiery end in the sky. We'll know when
CleanSpace One is operational by a marked increase the frequency of news stories on Bubbas reporting UFO
sightings.
Space Debris Collector Robot
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and text used on the RF Cafe website are hereby acknowledged.
This archive links to the many video and audio
files that have been featured on RF Cafe.