Protecting space stations from deadly space debris

Protecting space stations from deadly space debris

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TRANSCRIPT:

ASTRONAUT: Mission abort. Repeat. Mission abort.

HOST: In the opening scene of Gravity, a collision with space debris leads to chaos.

ANNOUNCER: Debris from the missile attack has caused a chain reaction, hitting other satellites and creating fresh debris.

HOST: Unfortunately this particular scenario isn’t just composed movie play. Imagine if I told you that was among the most dangerous items in distance? It is a paint chip. It doesn’t seem like much, but debris similar to this may be devastating when halfway Earth nearly 10 times the speed of a bullet. Space has become humankind’s biggest junkyard, and the debris problem is just getting worse. Some scientists are turning out of mining to mitigation.

MURIEL RICHARD-NOCA: The ClearSpace-1 servicer is a space robot. That’s a enormous step toward the distance sustainability.

HOST: This distance robot leads the way within a ambitious and complicated mission to clean up area until it’s too late. This is Just Might Work, a show about surprising solutions to our most significant problems.

JOHN CRASSIDIS: In the first days, nobody thought this could happen. Everybody said distance is large. Well it’s getting a great deal smaller. In the feeling that it’s getting more and more crowded.

HOST: There are an estimated 128 million pieces of space junk in orbit. Including things such as decommissioned satellites, the ash of Star Trek’s creator, and among Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadsters. Astronauts have also lost a bunch of things, like a software tote.

ASTRONAUT 1: Um, we’ve got a lost tool.

HOST: And also a camera.

ASTRONAUT 2: Uh, Suni your camera is behind you. I hope it’s tethered.

ASTRONAUT 3: It’s not. Oh great.

HOST: But the significant danger is the 99% of debris that is smaller than 10 centimeters and can not be monitored. They are flying around distance at nearly 18,000 miles per hour. And we do not understand where they are until they strike something.

CRASSIDIS: The issue is, you can have one orbit where the satellite is moving across the equator, along with the other one that’s moving around the sticks, and that’s a terrible situation, that’s a t-bone intersection. So a very small slice of debris can possibly wipe out a very major satellite.

HOST: Of the more than 500 collisions and breakups and explosions in space, among the most consequential was in 2009 if the Iridium 33 communication satellite collided with a defunct Russian satellite, creating thousands of new pieces of space debris. Even the International Space Station actually had to go a few times to prevent that debris field since it jeopardized the lives of astronauts on board. Because we can not monitor the small things, we can not clean this up yet. Hence the plan would be to start with the bigger pieces to prevent the collisions that create more debris that is disgusting.

LUC PIGUET: The question was, where should we start? Right? The majority of the little pieces of debris are in reality resulting from fragmentation occasions of big pieces of debris. It follows that, if you eliminate one big piece of debris, you eliminate thousands of potential future pieces of debris.

RICHARD-NOCA: What we’re bringing in, using the ClearSpace-1 mission is the concept of the tow truck. When you’ve got a mechanical failure, then it is okay to leave the vehicle on the freeway. There is always, for youpersonally, the opportunity to phone the tow truck support that will help you eliminate your vehicle by the freeway. Thus, ClearSpace-1 is actually bringing that tipping point where operators are going to have now the opportunity to do more than just repairing it, but actually removing it.

HOST: The ClearSpace mission in partnership with the European Space Agency is to capture, then eliminate a secondary payload port left by the Vega Rocket in 2013. And that’s a more complicated undertaking than it sounds.

RICHARD-NOCA: The trickiest part, which is going to be the capture, that will be accomplished autonomously. The object you’re trying to capture is tumbling, which means you’re in the case where you’re stable, but the object is moving so you have to recognize what the tumbling is these that you choose to do a maneuver to match your movement with the velocity of your object. And at this time, you can open the forearms and go and trigger the capture, then you slow down the…

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