Japan’s space agency teams up with fishing net maker to collect space debris
Japan’s space agency has joined forces with a 100-year-old fishing net company in order to create a system to collect space debris.
By Danielle Demetriou, Tokyo: www.telegraph.co.uk
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Nitto Seimo Co aim to tackle the increasingly hazardous problem of debris damaging space shuttles and satellites.
The new system involves launching a satellite attached to a thin metal net spanning several kilometers into space, before the net is detached and begins to capture space waste while orbiting earth.
During its rubbish collecting journey, the net will become charged with electricity and eventually be drawn back towards earth by magnetic fields – before both the net and its contents will burn upon entering the atmosphere.
Inspired by a basic fishing net concept, the super-strong space nets have been the subject of extensive research by Nitto Seimo for the past six years and consist of three layered metal threads, each measuring 1mm diameter and intertwined with fibres as thin as human hair.
The company, which became famous for inventing the world’s first machine to make strong knotless fishing nets in 1925, is aiming for the fuel-free system to be completed within two years.
See also: E-Waste 6.0™ Workshop WHAT IF Orbital Debris Could be Recycled? – Science Gallery Dublin – Ireland
Reblog: New Report Calls for Creation of “Space Superfund” to Clean Up Junk in Low Earth Orbit
via: www.popsci.com by By Clay Dillow
The burgeoning problem of space debris and the threat it presents to satellites, manned space mission, and occasionally the International Space Station is no secret to those following the headlines coming out of low Earth orbit. But though the threat is real, the problem receives little public visibility. So a new DARPA-commissioned report proposes taking a page from our terrestrial cleanup efforts, creating a Superfund for spacethat would both hold entities accountable for their space junk contributions and raise awareness of the problems space debris poses.
For most people – and even for the very companies and institutions causing the problem – all that orbiting detritus isn’t visible and has yet to cause a serious calamity or loss of life. It’s out of sight and couldn’t be further from the mind. But according to think tank RAND, the author of the DARPA report, the same principles used to approach pollution problems on Earth – even visibility problems – can be tweaked to work in space.
A Superfund for space, the report says, could make space polluters pay for the cleanup of low Earth orbit much as polluting industries are held accountable for cleaning up their fouled real estate on Earth. But, like Superfund, it could also support those cleanup efforts with help from the space community. But perhaps more importantly, it could help both governments and private industry reduce their outputs of space debris and cultivate a space culture in which creating debris is considered unacceptable.
One of the report’s authors likens the problem to this past summer’s BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico – the initial spill garnered some concern, but once the huge oil slicks and oil-laden birds became visible, public awareness (and righteous outrage) grew. By making the space debris issue a shared problem, a space Superfund could instigate more cooperative engagement to solve the problem.
And like the BP oil spill, the report’s authors acknowledge, simply having a “remedy” on the shelf won’t suffice. A space Superfund could develop and test effective methods of containing and dealing with space debris before a major disaster happens in space so that industry or agencies aren’t casting about for a solution while an orbital calamity is unfolding.
Because if containing a mess 5,000 feet underwater appeared difficult, just wait until the scenario is replaying itself 200 miles above the Earth.
Pentagon: A Space Junk Collision Could Set Off Catastrophic Chain Reaction, Disable Earth Communications
By Clay Dillow on www.popsci.com
Every now and again someone raises a stern warning about the amount of space junk orbiting Earth. Those warnings are usually met with general indifference, as very few of us own satellites or travel regularly to low Earth orbit. But the DoD’s assessment of the space junk problem finds that perhaps we should be paying attention: space junk has reached a critical tipping point that could result in a cataclysmic chain reaction that brings everyday life on Earth to a grinding halt.
Our reliance on satellites goes beyond the obvious. We depend on them for television signals, the evening weather report, and to find our houses on Google Earth when we’re bored at work. But behind the scenes, they also inform our warfighting capabilities, keep track of the global shipping networks that keep our economies humming, and help us get to the places we need to get to via GPS.
According to the DoD’s interim Space Posture Review, that could all come crashing down. Literally. Our satellites are sorely outnumbered by space debris, to the tune of 370,000 pieces of junk up there versus 1,100 satellites. That junk ranges from nuts and bolts lost during spacewalks to pieces of older satellites to whole satellites that no longer function, and it’s all whipping around the Earth at a rate of about 4.8 miles per second.
The fear is that with so much junk already up there, a collision is numerically probable at some point. Two large pieces of junk colliding could theoretically send thousands more potential satellite killers into orbit, and those could in turn collide with other pieces of junk or with satellites, unleashing another swarm of debris. You get the idea.
To give an idea of how quickly a chain reaction could get out hand consider this: in February of last year a defunct Russian satellite collided with a communications satellite, turning 2 orbiting craft into 1,500 pieces of junk. The Chinese missile test that obliterated a satellite in 2007 spawned 100 times more than that, scattering 150,000 pieces of debris.
If a chain reaction got out of control up there, it could very quickly sever our communications, our GPS system (upon which the U.S. military heavily relies), and cripple the global economy (not to mention destroy the $250 billion space services industry), and whole orbits could be rendered unusable, potentially making some places on Earth technological dead zones.
