Behold the mighty Swiss SPACE JUNK NOSHER PODULE The CleanSpace One Project is going to deploy a conical net on its orbital dustpan ship to capture a small SwissCube satellite, which had been purposefully littered into orbit as a demonstration of a interstellar debris collection. A 10cm3 satelliting box has been zipping about Earth's atmosphere for over five years, with …
"It only takes one error in the calculation of the approach for SwissCube to bounce off CleanSpace One and rocket out into space."
Which, if the point is cleanup, would be a success, right? Come to think about it, rather than destroying a large and costly satellite to clean up a single small and cheap one, wouldn't it be easier to just give the space junk a nudge so it ends up in a decaying orbit?
If we knock them out "into space", I'm not sure if they'll keep on going or just orbit around at a higher level. If we nudge it downwards, there's still problems since it's getting crowded up there. The problem seems to be applying the nudge and how much to give it. We wouldn't want to push it at the wrong time or wrong speed as it might create more problems than it solves with collisions.
As I recall, various groups/individuals have proposed this type of capture scheme for several decades... Not a bad idea if we could build something (or several somethings) big enough and maneuverable enough to clear the big and the small stuff. There's bolts up there still from Apollo and other early systems that used explosive bolts for separation and other functions. The big stuff (like the bigger satellites can be avoided. It's the little stuff that is becoming a big problem.
"I'm not sure if they'll keep on going or just orbit around at a higher level"
My physics classes were a while ago now, but IIRC nudging anything in orbit upwards or downwards merely changes the shape of the resulting orbit from a circle to an elipse.
You need to change the orbiting speed of an object to change its height - faster if you want a higher orbit, slower for a lower one, presumably with a slight nudge here and there to keep the orbit nice and circular.
The long lived space junk is from retired observation/spy sats and retired geostationaries. These are too high to experience significant drag and will remain there for ages. They are big so the net approach does not make sense. Similarly, nudging them is not going to push them out of the way. You need to attach and push it for quite a while to deorbit it.
Everything else we launch is in relatively low orbit and will end up reentering within a few decades anyway.
Also, trying to get anywhere near a retired spy sat (even with the intent to clean them) may earn you a set AEGIS crosshairs locked onto your cleaner satellite.
"Everything else we launch is in relatively low orbit and will end up reentering within a few decades anyway."
Except, like a teenagers' room or your average bachelor pad the junk stacks up faster than natural degradation can cope with. There's a reason they can move the ISS about, y'know...
If you give the junk a nudge, the spacecraft that nudged it would also be in the same orbit as the junk.
To nudge the junk without following it, you would need some way to "fire" it away, but every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so you would still need to expend the same amount of delta-V to correct the orbit of the cleaner ship.
I always wondered if you could use a long cable of something (carbon nanotube?) and attach that to the space junk, then fire the other end of the cable into the earth's atmo, thus aerobraking the junk into the atmo. Maybe some kind of parachute type structure on the end to increase the friction? If the coil and chute were light, you would then minimize the amount of dV required to fire it into the atmo, and also the amount of dV required to correct the orbit of the cleaner ship. Hell, if you attached a little rocket to the chute end of the cable, and didn't fire it until you released the junk, it would mean that the cleaner ship's orbit was not affected at all.
I suppose though, that anything in a lower orbit could get clothes-lined by the cable ;)
The Space Chicken might be useful too for the smaller items.
Alfred Chicken was pretty handy at collecting junk too.
You're right; it's YOLT that has the spacecraft consuming rocket; the shuttle in Moonraker is hijacked off the back of the 747. Many years since I saw either of those films (I much prefer the books), and memory had blurred them into one.
So: Has the world learned nothing from Ernst Stavro Blofeld?
They tossed a beer bottle into the stream five years ago, and promise that they are going to collect it "eventually", and then use the technology to collect other beer bottles at some later date? Seems to me that that is littering with excuses.
How about instead actually collecting the existing beer bottles once they have the technology operational? Gawd/ess knows that there is plenty of existing litter in known orbits ...
Quark before DS9
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077066/
Quark expects to be on a good will mission, but it turns out that he is to pick up garbage as usual. But this isn't a usual mission as Quark and his crew are quickly captured by Zorgon the Malevolent...
It is not intended to be a final design that solves everything. It is intended to show that you can make a small garbage collector for space junk.
If they can catch the cubesat, it is a win. We can then build more advanced systems based on the knowledge gained.
Swisscube was not launched just to be junk. It had it's own mission.
"École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne's Center for Space Engineering and Signal Processing 5 Laboratory (LTS 5)"?
"5"?
What happened to the first four? Did the previous one get sucked back in time? Did they all sink into a swamp? What are the Swiss really up to? Will Penfold ever finish his egg and cress sandwich? Did I leave the gas on? Tune in next week!
It's about search and capture - having shown that to be viable they can work on multiple captures, and dumping the garbage without destroying the cleanup sat. That would require something capable of multiple significant orbit changes, rather than just deorbiting itself, so rather more expensive and not necessary for this trial.
I'd like to see a clean-up sat with a sticky chameleon tongue. Yes I know this is a very silly idea which really isn't practical at all... even so, I'd like to see it :-)
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