Space Environmentalism wants YOU to pick up the trash.
Posted: Thu Nov 12, 2009 3:47 am
Well.. not quite. 
You may have heard that we've created quite the mess up there. The acumilated rubbish of 51 years of spacefaring is posing a threat to future space missions, to the point where scenarios involving the Kessler Syndrom (a chain reaction scenario where one impact event creates a multitude of other high velocity objects that cause impact events themselves) have increased with a likelyhood of 50% since 2007.
DARPA wants YOU to come up with an idea to clean it up... before November. Hm. Yeah, too late there. The best suggestion would have gotten a sought after job position at DARPA, but for the Mythbusters or Scrapheap Challenge fans among us I think it's still a fun thing to think about . I think we can rest assured the million dollar idea would probably still be appreciated by mankind's future progeny.
Case description:
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity ... 8d2b300b5f
One (poorly thought out) idea involved shooting a bunch of water into orbit. Debris would lose momentum upon impact with the water and finally burn up in the atmosphere. It did not take into account that water is relatively heavy to transport and that it won't indefinitely remain in its liquid state in outer space, becoming an impact threat to other satelites itself.
It does brings up the excellent point of momentum. As these pieces are hurling in orbit at incredible speeds, changing that momentum is enough to either vamporize them in the atmosphere, or make them leave orbit indefintely. So, any novel ideas? Spacebrooms? Fishing trawlers?
You may have heard that we've created quite the mess up there. The acumilated rubbish of 51 years of spacefaring is posing a threat to future space missions, to the point where scenarios involving the Kessler Syndrom (a chain reaction scenario where one impact event creates a multitude of other high velocity objects that cause impact events themselves) have increased with a likelyhood of 50% since 2007.
DARPA wants YOU to come up with an idea to clean it up... before November. Hm. Yeah, too late there. The best suggestion would have gotten a sought after job position at DARPA, but for the Mythbusters or Scrapheap Challenge fans among us I think it's still a fun thing to think about . I think we can rest assured the million dollar idea would probably still be appreciated by mankind's future progeny.
Case description:
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity ... 8d2b300b5f
One (poorly thought out) idea involved shooting a bunch of water into orbit. Debris would lose momentum upon impact with the water and finally burn up in the atmosphere. It did not take into account that water is relatively heavy to transport and that it won't indefinitely remain in its liquid state in outer space, becoming an impact threat to other satelites itself.
It does brings up the excellent point of momentum. As these pieces are hurling in orbit at incredible speeds, changing that momentum is enough to either vamporize them in the atmosphere, or make them leave orbit indefintely. So, any novel ideas? Spacebrooms? Fishing trawlers?