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ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris
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Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris
#12Active debris removal (harpoon satellites, magnet arms, whatever) are not a solution to this problem and are a huge waste of money. These missions answer the question "could one dock with debris and deorbit it?" To which the answer is "obviously yes, but at enormous cost" and you don't need to spend 50M euros to prove it. The answer is exactly what governments and industry have been doing for at least two decades now…
And make sure that even in the most unhappy cases, you vent your tanks! Vent vent vent vent! Tank explosions are where the really nasty debris numbers come from.
Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris
#13Active debris removal (harpoon satellites, magnet arms, whatever) are not a solution to this problem and are a huge waste of money. These missions answer the question "could one dock with debris and deorbit it?" To which the answer is "obviously yes, but at enormous cost" and you don't need to spend 50M euros to prove it. The answer is exactly what governments and industry have been doing for at least two decades now…
Active debris removal is almost at the level if being an experimental technology.
If it works, and if it gets cheaper as the technology matures, it might let use remove derelict satellites before they break up into smaller pieces.
It is usually easier to remove a few thousand big pieces of trash than to remove millions of small pieces of trash.
Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris
#14How massive would an object need to be to attract space debris using the object's gravitational pull? I am guessing it is way more massive than anything we can put into orbit.
You mean the things currently escaping the gravity of the Earth?
Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris
#15I guess talking about Kessler Syndrome is worth while here. A chain reaction where one collision, leads to more, which leads to more. It may be a slow motion chain reaction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome We definitely do need a way to clean things up, it is a shared resource. Unfortunately that means it suffers from tragedy of the commons.
One more good reason to start strengthening the idea of global governance?
Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris
#16If a brief moratorium (brief in geological time, like 25-50 years) was imposed, would this clear up? Or, does it descend into grey goo in space because at a threshold size, the debris can "float" on the exosphere?
Not a suggestion we call a halt on sat launches for 50 years. I'm asking if the remediation of time would work.
Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris
#17[flagged]
Isn't this the agency that landed on a comet? That seems pretty innovative.
Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris
#18Tangentially related: Could this be weaponized? What's stopping a malicious actor from purposely creating a lot of debris in orbital space for the purposes of knocking communications down? Is there a plan in place?
Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris
#19If a brief moratorium (brief in geological time, like 25-50 years) was imposed, would this clear up? Or, does it descend into grey goo in space because at a threshold size, the debris can "float" on the exosphere? Not a suggestion we call a halt on sat launches for 50 years. I'm asking if the remediation of time would work.
According to NASA: If the debris is 800k can take centuries and geostationary objects on the high end (~36000km) can take thousands of years.
Most of the debris is in LEO so it could take decades to centuries for the debris to clear out
Re: ESA report shows unsustainable levels of orbital debris
#20How massive would an object need to be to attract space debris using the object's gravitational pull? I am guessing it is way more massive than anything we can put into orbit.
You would not be attracting stationary objects, you would be attracting things flying past at tens of thousands of whatever unit per hour you like best. Gravity is nowhere near strong enough to affect these objects for purposes of collecting them.
You don't need to collect them, just perturb their orbit enough that they burn up in a reasonably short time.
Still not viable I assume, but...