Dust for space junk

Barring any real world effective means of prevention, mitigation DOES seem logical.

OODA nearly always starts with "Observe."

 

I think Spectre (!) already has something that could be adapted. Musk could make 1,000s of these drones with a net across the jaws and sweep space with them. Return to earth, recycle the recovered stuff, and then reuse the drone.

 

X

?????

 

likei said, if there was that much stuff up there, flying all over the place at different trajectories, and 5-55,000 mph.... we would see damage much more often

 

hmmm, NASA was tracking paint chips, in 1983, but lost all the moon landing data.

cool, that makes sense

 

Here is the image some readers might not have seen, it doesn't initially show on my browser either:

The energy cost alone of capture / return / recycle / reuse far exceeds the recovery value of any whole satellites not specifically built for that purpose, let alone the vastly more numerous smaller pieces of debris. I'd think that only items having great foreign intelligence value would be worth this approach.

There will be no "sweeping space with nets", apart from co-orbital cozying up to specific individual targets for capture. You can't make nets strong enough catch other debris moving at high speed relative to the net.

It capture drones are to be implemented, I'd think it much more affordable to make them single-use, capturing a single piece (or several in very similar orbit), and dragging the payload down just far enough to ensure reasonably quick atmospheric disposal. This necessarily means disposal of the capture drone too. If it could have enough fuel to save itself and run another capture assignment, then it would be more fuel efficient to run multiple captures first, before any disposal. Fuel load will be a very harsh restriction of any chemical rocket propulsion. Electric ion drive might be a better means, if one has sufficient patience for their much slower maneuvers.

 

The paint chip was un-tracked. Everything large enough to be tracked even now, let alone then, would have blown out the window, and the parts not vaporized would have make an exit hole on the other side, destroying the Shuttle.

The power of bureaucracy.

I guess you didn't see the impact damage assessments of the recovered LDEF and EURECA satellites. Elsewhere, the replaced / returned solar wings from HST were also examined.

 

lol ! nothing like putting more layers on the onion before you start peeling!

 

Concerning #41, it is not obvious to me that a new satellite could provide better tracking than what US Space Command (is that name accurate?) or what Leolabs

Collision Avoidance | LeoLabs

do with ground-based radars. The latter is a purely commercial operation and anyone can buy their data. I assume that Leolabs has already done statistics on conjunction events they have observed. That they have a pretty good idea of probability of collisions through time. There is no requirement for them to make such an analysis public. Their website features an 'interaction' when 2 satellites passed 37 meters apart.

Their conjunction assessment from

Satellite Operations | LeoLabs

includes

“At present, the risk of collision with an object 1 cm or larger peaks at about 750 km altitude with a probability of about 10^-3/year for a 2 m2 satellite. This number is no longer vanishingly small - with over 800 active satellites in LEO, this portends a catastrophic collision every year. In addition, the number of operational satellites in LEO is projected to increase from hundreds to thousands or even tens of thousands over the coming decades.”

That was 2017. I don't know how much 'population' has increased at 750 km. Below 500 km with Starlink and other similar networks, it has increased a lot. So, we can sit back and wait for it to happen, or get going on cleanup.

One thing for certain is that if things get 'Kessler' up there, all tracking networks will be at least briefly overloaded. Even satellite operators buying information from Leolabs (etc.) will not receive timely information for avoidance maneuvers. A mini-Kessler could grow quite rapidly to a big mess.

 

The advantage of ice is that your shot is concentrated in a smaller area for a longer time. Vapor gives you a wider shot with a close to 100% chance of impact, but a cloud of vapor traveling in vacuum is going to quickly disperse to the point where it is ineffective. The kinetic energy of a given amount of water doesn't change with its phase, but your ability to do useful work does, particularly in regards to range.

I think we should modify our water cannon and make it an ice cannon instead. You could fire while in the Earths shadow so as to get extended range. Let's say you want a 10,000 Kilometer effective range. You'd need to figure out how large an ice ball you needed to still have some solid ice after a 10k shot. That would depend on the speed you could impart to the ice. Anybody have a good way to impart a high muzzle velocity to ice balls traveling in vacuum? Maybe a steam driven ram?

 

If I'm reading that right, the uncertainties (unclear if 1-, 2-, or 3-σ, or something else) were 64 meters for IRAS, 60 meters for GGSE4, with the centers of those uncertainties passing 37 meters apart.

Solar power 'wings', being large, should be expecting punctures much more frequently. I should look for studies of the Hubble solar wings that were replaced, at least twice. At least these can be made somewhat fault tolerant.

 

I happen to think that Leolabs is the bee's knees. Best thing since sliced bread. Perhaps too much blind love for Costa Rica

Anyway, what they can sell is advance notification for when a satellite operator needs to consider a 'sidestep'. Yesterday's news and all prior days are no longer valuable. That is why somebody should just ask Leolabs to donate all their old data on satellite near misses. Do some university level statistics and see what the collision risks are:

For different orbital heights,
Changed in response to adding X new satellites at Y orbital heights,
(and more controversially) How much each new satellite shoot down (there have been 5 right?) adds to risk at different orbital heights,

If they don't agree, maybe they are not great guys after all.

 

Yeah, I was just being silly and bringing in a James Bond scheme. I couldn't figure out why the picture wouldn't post. That was the 2nd one I tried. The first was an screenshot from the movie, not a toy. Thanks.

 

I haven't followed most of the Bond series. As for pictures not posting, I've found that a number of them not displaying in the original post, at least in my browsers, will display in the edit frame when I hit "Reply". That is how I grabbed that copy. When running into that problem when posting, I've sometimes had to store and upload them in different forms until something works.

 

Starlinks are doing a lot more sidestepping than I had thought:

https://www.space.com/starlink-satellite-conjunction-increase-threatens-space-sustainability