Now, here’s something new to worry about: space debris
Of course, it may not be new to you, but it’s new to me.
I wonder whether earth will end up sporting a ring or rings like Saturn, only man-made ones instead? And will it make future space exploration difficult or even impossible?
Low Earth orbit was the site of a near-miss today (Jan. 27) that had the potential to create thousands of pieces of hazardous space debris…
As low Earth orbit (LEO) becomes increasingly crowded, such close calls are becoming more common, highlighting the very real threat to the environment in which the International Space Station (ISS) and thousands of critical satellites operate…
The near-miss happened in what LeoLabs calls a “bad neighborhood” in LEO that spans from 590 to 652 miles in altitude (950 to 1050 kilometers). “This region has significant debris-generating potential in #LEO due to a mix of breakup events and abandoned derelict objects,” LeoLabs wrote in another Twitter post(opens in new tab) Friday (Jan. 27). “In particular, this region is host to ~160 SL-8 rocket bodies along with their ~160 payloads deployed over 20 years ago.” LeoLabs added that there were 1,400 similar near-misses in this region of LEO between June and September 2022 alone.
Incidents such as these underscore the need for new strategies at mitigating or removing orbital debris from LEO. There are currently close to 30,000 pieces of orbital debris being tracked by the Department of Defense, but many more are lurking that are too small to be detected, according to NASA.
Kind of like my carpet, only more dangerous.
Not a new issue at all and years of research, even real world testing of methods has been done.
Most nations (I think all that go to space) cooperate in cataloging this stuff and notifying all other space going nations of their stuff. Some have been a little delayed (China) in notification.
In the beginning decades of humankinds’ forays into orbit debris was not given a top priority, and a lot of the particles that are of concern today come from those early decades. I doubt it will get worse. All space programs are very cognizant of the problem and work to avoid creating unnecessary debris.
Cleaning it up is quite a challenge. We imagine these things floating slowly where a probe could simply “sweep” them up, but it’s all traveling tens of thousands of miles per hour (bullets travel 600 – 1,200mph) and even a small chunk (a chunk the size of a bullet) can do tremendous harm to a spacecraft. Imagine trying to even something that can “sweep” up buckshot mid-air after it’s launched from a shotgun. Now imagine the buckshot is traveling 40 times faster.
So much of science “news” is taking a single, immature data point, extrapolating it out generations hence and screaming, “The sky is falling!”
Paul Ehrlich did this in the ’60s with population trends. Turns out, when people move from farms to cities they have fewer children AND when women work outside of the home or farm they have fewer children.
When societies move to industrialization they do a lot of strip mining, clear forests and pollute water sources. Then, when they get through that phase they manage forests and control pollution. People don’t remain static and people don’t like to live in their own sh*t if they have a choice. If the number of automobiles in Manhattan today were horse drawn carriages the island would be covered in a mile of horse manure.
These predictions based on static trend lines never take guys like Norman Borlaug into consideration. Or things like this*. No matter how many books Steven Pinker writes showing humankind’s incredible ability to improve our surroundings the message is always this: “Cower in fear! Crawl under your bed in the fetal position and await disaster.”
About five years ago one of the Little Fireflies was enamored of Ms. Thunberg so I had her watch a 90 minute youtube interview of Boyan Slat. Around the age of 27 he invented several incredible machines that clean up plastic in the ocean and from river sources. He was about Greta’s age when he began his research and design. One teen-ager heard about pollution, panicked and is screaming that humanity must stop and go backwards. Another teen-ager heard about pollution and started improving his mind and understanding of the subject then used creativity to make tremendous inroads into solving the problem. Who is happier 5 years later; Greta or Boyan. Who has helped more people? Who is actually “saving the planet?”
*Big Data is using AI to brute force protein sequences from data on 280 million different proteins to engineer new proteins with beneficial uses.
Glenn Reynolds recently linked to something about plans in the works to deploy some kind of space garbage collection service. Seems like it’s much needed.
Sorry, I don’t remember details and have no link.
Kate,
Glenn posts on this often. It’s been a concern of his for years, and it is a valid concern. As I wrote, it’s a hard problem to solve regarding the existing debris, and, despite the best efforts of scientists, there will be more.
Cataloging the debris has gotten good and continues to improve. Clean up is a tricky challenge, F=MA and at large As even a tiny M has a huge F. But it’s only been 80 years that we’ve been putting stuff in orbit.
Laser ablation. What could go wrong? Maybe
generate a cloud of deadly micro debris from one larger deadly particle?
om, a way to cloud the globe and End Global Warming. 🙂
And, Elon is adding thousands of Starlink stations to give everyone internet connections.
On another matter – S. Curry is complaining about an affordable housing project by his $30 million house – https://freebeacon.com/democrats/lib-nba-star-stephen-curry-opposes-affordable-housing-near-his-30-million-mansion/ Another NIMBY creature…
Worry about things you can do something about.
Speaking of space junk…. this showed up the other day in my YouTube “right margin”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBHbLV7xEhc
It appears that Apollo-11 is still with us, or at least parts of it are hanging around.
It is all eventually going to burn up on reentry. Gravity will out.
@Rufus T. Firefly
It was less that Ehrlich got population growth wrong; it was that he hadn’t noticed the ongoing Green Revolution. That is, food production was going way, way up.
On the other hand, it’s true either way that people react to trends, and pretending that doesn’t happen is the heart of it.
Boobah,
My point on Ehrlich is he assumed people’s behavior is static. Just like many people who make dire predictions about climate change ignore human adaptation. Humans are very clever monkeys.
I guess NASA et al. never got the “Please Don’t Litter” memo….
(Hope they do better WRT “Please Pick Up After Your Canis Major/Canis Minor”…)
…and for those wondering what a spin-cycle icon is doing up there in outer space…
“Mysterious spiral formation appears among stars above Hawaii”—
https://nypost.com/2023/01/30/mysterious-moving-spiral-appears-among-stars-above-hawaii/
The speeds of orbital objects are indeed “faster than a speeding bullet.” However, for recovery or garbage collection, the speed you have to worry about is *relative* speed. That’s the difference in your speed and the speed of the object in question. If you are traveling the same speed and direction as that bullet, then you should be able to just reach out and grab it. The problem is that there are so many smallish objects out there it becomes tougher to collect them all. We won’t even touch on the differences between circular and elliptical orbits. Really, though, all you need to do is slow an object down enough so that it will reenter the atmosphere on its own and burn up. Sounds simple. Right?