Man has made it to the moon, hurled equipment to the edges of the solar system, even examined the very beginning of time, but our true achievements are even more important (if less awe-inspiring): we’ve raised litter above and beyond the surface of the Earth! So much so that with some 300,000 objects orbiting our little blue dot, we need a new detection grid if we’re ever to get off-planet without having our heads bashed in by a ball of old trash.
There’s an entire ring of old, broken, or blasted to pieces bits and bobs in near Earth orbit, each with enough energy to permanently ruin an astronauts entire day (at least until the explosive decompression sets in). With twenty thousand objects already tracked, and hundreds of thousands more still in orbit, the International Space Station has already had to make emergency maneuvers to avoid collisions twice - and an Iridium satellite famously didn’t make such maneuvers, colliding with a Cosmos-2511 colleague and exploding both (producing a storm of extra debris in what could be the world’s most expensive, if slow, chain reaction.)
The new tracking system has been contracted to Northrop Grumman, who were handed thirty million dollars, pointed up and told “Keep track of all that stuff.” The new system builds on previous technology and is called a “Space Fence” because it projects constant radio beams up from a few points on Earth - as Earth rotates, the radio region sweeps across all the objects in orbit.
The interesting note is that this strategy is still observation and avoidance - you need careful timing or maneuvering systems to actually evade any identified impact-possible pieces, otherwise you just get a countdown to space explosion. Awesome for Michael Bay, sucks for everyone else. It’s pretty tricky to get garbage collectors into low Earth orbit but we’re going to have to do something soon - or literally become penned into our own home by all the trash we threw out the front door. And then wonder why nobody’s coming to visit.
Note: there was one attempt to bring down trash, the student-project SNAP satellite. Ironically, it failed and became space-trash itself.
Luke McKinney.
SNAP http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/SSC/research/astrodynamics/rendezvous
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