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Space Debris: What Can We Do With Unwanted Satellites ?

posted by CoolHand on Saturday May 02 2015, @05:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the still-looking-for-solutions dept.

AnonTechie writes:

http://theconversation.com/space-debris-what-can-we-do-with-unwanted-satellites-40736

There are thousands of satellites in Earth orbit, of varying age and usefulness. At some point they reach the end of their lives, at which point they become floating junk. What do we do with them then?

Most satellites are not designed with the end of their life in mind. But some are designed to be serviced, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, which as part of its final service was modified to include a soft capture mechanism. This is an interface designed to allow a future robotic spacecraft to attach itself and guide the telescope to safe disposal through burn-up in the Earth’s atmosphere once its operational life has ended.

Thinking about methods to retire satellites is important, because without proper disposal they become another source of space debris – fragments of old spacecraft, satellites and rockets now orbiting Earth at thousands of miles per hour. These fragments travel so fast that even a piece the size of a coin has enough energy to disable a whole satellite. There are well over 100,000 pieces this size or larger already orbiting Earth, never mind much larger items – for example the Progress unmanned cargo module, which Russian Space Agency mission controllers have lost control of and which will orbit progressively lower until it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday May 02 2015, @08:56PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Saturday May 02 2015, @08:56PM (#177952) Journal

    Regarding fuel. One may have to send up some station with a lot of kamikaze (small) robots and make use of smart navigation and time instead of gigantic fuel supplies. Perhaps solar sails can be used?

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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Saturday May 02 2015, @09:34PM

    by zocalo (302) on Saturday May 02 2015, @09:34PM (#177962)
    Thinking about it a bit more, maybe in the case of larger chunks of debris in LEO this could possibly be an application for cube-sats; with each one essentially just a basic guidance computer, motor, "docking clamp", and the rest a fuel tank. Each cube-sat might only be able to de-orbit a single object, or maybe two at a pinch if the orbits lined up, but given how many of them you could launch on a single booster that might be more efficient than a single satellite cruising around and trying to de-orbit multiple dead objects.
    --
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    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 05 2015, @12:04AM

      by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday May 05 2015, @12:04AM (#178864) Journal

      I'll guess the limiting factor will be the fuel and cost. The amount of micro amounts of fuel has to be enough to push the object with enough energy to de-orbit.