Space Junk Problem Is More Threatening Than Ever, Report Warns | Hacker News Reader

Space Junk Problem Is More Threatening Than Ever, Report Warns

space.com

32 pointssasvari18 comments

It's not mentioned in the linked article but a significant proportion of the space junk in orbit can be traced to China using a missile to destroy a satellite back in 2007.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2007/01/china_blows_u...

Here's another link to that event, that also discusses a collision between two satellites:

http://www.space.com/8334-junk-space.html

The claim is that the China missile test and this collision are responsible for 60% of the number of objects in orbit.

Even though space is vast, the number of useful orbits is limited. For example, the A-train (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-train_(satellite_constellatio... ) is a parade of remote sensing satellites in sun-synchronous orbits (as they look down, it is always within a few minutes of noon). So this makes inadvertent collisions more likely.

Slightly related, here's a close asteroid passby that happened last summer:

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news172.html

Slight nitpick - the article said that the collision and missile test increased the amount of debris by 60%, not that they were responsible for 60% of debris in orbit. Still a lot, but not more than half.

I said "claims" because, for reasons too tedious to list, I don't think they do know or can know a very exact percentage (even to +/- 10%).

And note, they're talking about "number of items" (not "amount of debris" as you say -- that would imply mass, a different thing).

But if it's anywhere near half of the "number of items", then these two crashes alone are a highly significant source of junk. I did not know that, and that seemed worth a link.

Sounds as if space war is getting too expensive, there is a cheap way to make it infeasible.

It's only slightly related and not a likely solution since finding space debris is an issue but there was an Anime I recently watched called Planetes that followed a team of space debris collectors that I would recommend. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes

Collecting space debris became a large issue in the story because of civilian space travel expanding and collisions that lead to catastrophe. They bring up the Kessler syndrome more than once as well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome which describes a moment at which there would be too much debris in space to launch anything else for a long time.

I've watched a couple episodes of that, was quite entertaining. I remember the Greek title on a Japanese series caught my eye.

I just started watching this the other day. I'm really enjoying it.

The bigger problem by far is the treaty the _prohibits_ companies from one nation from even touching the space junk of another nation. I know that there are several different schemes/ideas floating around (space tethers for one) trying to get funding to de-orbit or salvage space junk but they always get hung up on the political problem. This is definitely _not_ a technical issue.

I'm ignorant on the issue - which treaty are you referring to?

>This is definitely _not_ a technical issue.

Are there any ideas with a TRL>napkin?

Next question: How do we take care of space junk? It seems like it would be a very expensive problem to fix?

That's the problem...there is no viable solution at the moment. I can't even think of where to start, aside from something ridiculous like 'Big Magnets in space!'

The laser-based suggestions sound pretty feasible. A laser based on the moon might even be plausible. The key is that you don't necessarily need a lot of energy to bump a piece of debris enough to knock it out of orbit.

http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/orions_laser_hunting_spac...

If you are realy interested, look into NASA's Orbital Debris program. They have a must-read quarterly newsletter: http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/

must-read space debris quarterly newsletter : scientists :: the Masters telecast contains 56 minutes of golf action per hour : golfers

(I happen to be in the latter camp)

The long term solution is to cut NASA's budget more.

Andy Griffith, with a little help from Isaac Asimov, has already solved this problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_1

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