No more satellite phone calls, Internet, or Skype. If space agencies don’t address the debris problem, in time the Space Age could become a new Dark Age. It took some figuring by ESA engineers, including studying views from onboard cameras, to reconstruct what had happened.
Last year Europe’s still-operational Sentinel-1A radar satellite was hit by just such an object, momentarily knocking the spacecraft off kilter and leaving a dent, 15 inches in diameter, in a solar array. The BB-size to marble-size pieces may figure in as many as 100 collisions a year, many of which go unnoticed because they’re more like fender-benders than head-on crashes, or because they hit non-working satellites. ESA estimates there are 750,000 bits of debris between marble-size and baseball-size, and 166 million smaller particles still capable of doing damage (even tiny flecks of paint moving at five miles per second have scarred spacecraft windshields). Only seven percent of the total mass is operational satellites. Altogether, there’s about 7,500 tons of stuff in orbit, everything from fragments (the majority of objects) to multi-ton whole satellites. defense department’s Space Surveillance Network tracks only the big pieces-larger than a few inches in diameter. And if space users do nothing to clean up what’s already there, he says, the 29,000 or so large bits of space junk orbiting Earth today “would become more than 200,000 in 200 years.” Even if we stopped launching satellites today, it would continue, says Benjamin Bastida, an ESA space debris expert in Darmstadt, Germany. Kessler, who in 1978 predicted that space would eventually be so congested with dead satellites, pieces of satellites, derelict rocket stages, exploded fuel tanks, detached solar arrays, and other bits of space detritus that low Earth orbit, which in our technology-dependent age is prime real estate, would become unusable.Īccording to the European Space Agency, this cascade of collisions has already begun. This phenomenon has a name: the Kessler Syndrome, after former NASA scientist Donald J. A flying piece of fender or a hubcap keeps going until it slams into something else, creating another barrage of shrapnel. Since there is no gravity, nothing slows down, nothing comes to a stop, nothing falls to the ground. When the first car bumps into the second, both of them rebound into others. The next stage of work involves fabricating a more true-to-life engineering model – which will be more accurate than the prototypes – and more extensive testing.Now suppose the cars are circling hundreds of miles above Earth, and traveling at 17,500 mph. Muriel Richard-Noca, head of the project, emphasizes the extreme delicacy of the mission: “It only takes one error in the calculation of the approach for SwissCube to bounce off CleanSpace One and rocket out into space.”Īdds Michel Lauria, a professor of industrial technology at Hepia Lab in Geneva: “This system is more reliable and offers a larger margin for maneuvering than a claw or an articulated hand.”
To be accurate, they must take into account a variety of parameters, a team press statement notes, such as the angle of illumination of the Sun and the relative speed at which the CubeSat is moving through space. Other work on the initiative involves creating and testing visual approach algorithms on the cleanup satellite’s cameras. It will trap the small satellite and the two would combust together in the atmosphere. The prototype CleanSpaceOne resembles a net in the form of a cone that unfolds and then closes back down once it has captured the small satellite. An approach and capture system – a so-called “Pac-Man” solution.
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