PST
PST seems to have a very odd offset from GMT.
The International Space Station is due to swerve tomorrow morning to avoid a debris cloud from a Japanese satellite, the Russian Flight Control Centre said. A Russian Zvezda service module will fire booster rockets to shift the station out of the path of the space junk if the agency is certain it's necessary. The dodge is …
To all you entrepreneurs out there, looks like it's time for a career as Space Cowboys. We need someone to round up all the sapce junk. This would be perfect for the various small spacecraft under development. All they need is a grappling arm and perhaps some small remote control boosters that can be clamped on the trash. One good push with the arm would be enough to deorbit small junk while the boosters would cover the larger trash.
Simply push it "Down" and let gravity and the atmosphere do the rest.
Aerogel....
While the stuff is incredibly expensive (isn't everything involving space) couldn't they simply fly a giant petri dish filled with aerogel around to "capture" some of this junk? The aerogel would stop it simply "bouncing" off the the capturing device (which in turn could cause more issues)/
Maybe theres some obvious reason why this idea isn't workable (too large an area to cover?)
Consider the other few dimensions: it's a volume to be hoovered, not an area, and you can do the maths to roughly determine that volume; some of the things to be hoovered are moving around higgledy-piggledy; and, in other cases, they're moving around, in orbits, at jaw-dropping/body-splattering speed. If it were all neat-n-tidy, then cleaning up would be easy.
1. The things up there are generally non-magnetic, because otherwise the magnetic field from the Earth really buggers up their orbits.
2. What makes you think that there is lots of gold or platinum? If it's because of the yellowy orange colour you see on them, then I suggest yoy save your effort and just collect lemons and oranges instead;the orange colour is the plastic polyimide.
That's a pretty good solution...IIRC solar wind causes the orbit to wander to one side, long term, so eventually the perigee will dip low enough to pick up drag, which will circularize the orbit then, very soon, the item will deorbit. Nice, passive thing, a solar sail. No fiddling with fuel, boosters, or giving the item a big quick push. Just a bigger solar wind effect (over years) to hasten the deorbit time.
Note *very* small objects can cause *serious* damage. The Shuttle windshields regularly took surface damage (the structure is 3 layers deep) and on at least 1 occasion got through 2 layers.
These could be as small as paint "flecks"
The *ideal* rubbish collector would cause the stuff to de-orbit (it's *very* unlikely any stuff this size would survive and be literally vaporized before it reached the ground) without consumables.
1 possible way would be to give the object a surface charge and rely on their motion at right angles to the Earth's magnetic field to convert motion into either an upward or downward (deeper into the atmosphere) movement. Trouble is an electron gun would gain as much +ve charge as the object acquired -ve charge. Not necessarily a problem provide it was much bigger and in a higher orbit. IIRC Lasers have also been suggested to surface ionise such objects without the laser being charged in turn.
Another *serious* (I think The Aerospace Corp suggested it) idea was a satellite with a gas tank. Flying ahead of the debris cloud the sat releases a *precisely* timed gas burst (pretty much anything should be viable) ahead of the cloud. Before the gas disperses the cloud is suddenly flying (at about M23) through an "atmosphere" that is 100 (1000?) times denser and either vaporizes or decelerates and falls to a lower orbit (where it should decelerate further).
Will anyone get *funding* to deal with this rather dull (until some $Bn DoD bird gets hit of course) problem?
Probably not.
I read on Slashdot that some artist wanted to throw a disc into orbit for alien archaeologists.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9231973/Artist_s_project_to_blast_gold_plated_artifact_disc_into_orbit?taxonomyId=19&pageNumber=1
My first thought was "great, more spacejunk".
Would a NASA cleanup respect moronic arts projects, or would they just sweep them all away?