Space Debris: Swiss aim to launch first space cleaner

Swiss scientists announced Wednesday plans to develop a machine that acts almost like a vacuum cleaner to scoop up thousands of abandoned satellite and rocket parts, cleaning up outer space.

The Swiss Space Centre at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), a top science university, announced the launch of CleanSpace as the first installment of a family of satellites designed to clear up space debris.

According to EPFL, "16,000 objects larger than 10 centimetres in diameter and hundreds of millions of smaller particles are ripping around the earth at speeds of several kilometres per second."

"It has become essential to be aware of the existence of this debris and the risks that are run by its proliferation," said Claude Nicollier, an astronaut and EPFL professor.

The space centre said it was moving beyond rhetoric to "take immediate action to get this stuff out of orbit."

Centre spokesman Jerome Grosse said two options are being considered for the cleaning satellites.

One is a machine that scoops up debris and then burns itself up in Earth's atmosphere.

The second is a model capable of retrieving the debris, which is then ejected into the atmosphere while the cleaner remains in space.

"We want to offer and sell a whole family of ready-made systems, designed as sustainably as possible, that are able to de-orbit several different kinds of satellites," explained centre director Volker Gass.

"Space agencies are increasingly finding it necessary to take into consideration and prepare for the elimination of the stuff theyre sending into space. We want to be the pioneers in this area."

EPL cited a 2011 study by Swiss Re insurance company showing that every year there is almost a one in 10,000 chance that an orbiting satellite measuring 10 square metres will collide with a piece of space debris larger than one centimetre.

Orbital Space debris update

The latest Orbital Debris Quarterly News has the good news that, barring another satellite collision or other debris-creating event, the number of catalogued debris should drop over the next two years.

The deliberate destruction of the Fengyun-1C satellite in January 2007 created 3,218 pieces of trackable debris, and only about 200 of those have re-entered the atmosphere.

As the solar activity increases leading up to solar maximum in 2013, more of that debris should be cleared out.

NB: Readers in the northern latitudes should look out for more auroras.

Speaking of space debris, an experiment from 1963 deliberately placed millions of tiny copper needles in medium Earth orbit.

Project West Ford created an artificial ionosphere to help the military, back in the days before communication satellites.

The needles were 0.7 inches long and less than half the diameter of human hair (17.8 micrometers).

These were the right size dipole antennas for the 8 GHz wavelength used in the study.

Most of them re-entered the atmosphere by 1970, but there are still some in orbit today.

Electric fields (blue) and magnetic fields (red) radiated by a dipole antenna.

A spacecraft from an earlier attempt in 1961 is also still in orbit. Protests over this experiment led to the addition of a consultation clause in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. 

The result was, basically, all nations should sumit controversial proposals to the group before they did something that might wreck space for the rest of us.

If they had introduced more of these orbiting dipole antennas into the Earth's atmosphere, they could have wrecked global radio and microwave telescope observations.

NASA’s SkyLAb litter bill: Cleaning up after Space Debris

A “fine” imposed on NASA for littering Australia with debris from a crashing space station has finally been paid – 30 years late. 

The agency had apparently ignored the penalty issued after Skylab broke up on re-entry in a spectacular fireball in July 1979.

The 75-ton space station – America’s first – was home to a succession of astronauts in the early Seventies but thankfully it had long been abandoned when it crashed to Earth.

The night-time re-entry scattered fragments over western Australia. Parts fell on Esperance, a small town 360 miles east of Perth.

Town officials decided to fine NASA for dropping litter – and sent them a bill for the equivalent of 400 US dollars to cover the cost of the clean-up.

NASA ignored it and local councillors decided to write it off. But with the 30th anniversary of the crash coming up, they erected billboards around Esperance reminding people of the outstanding debt. Now listeners to a US radio station have clubbed together to wipe the slate clean.

Radio host Scott Barley, of California’s Highway Radio, heard about the fine and issued an appeal on his morning show for funds. The whip-round collected the $400 needed. The cheque has been sent already and Scott will fly to Australia next weekend for an official handover.

The billboards have now been stamped with a bright red sign: Paid in full!

OK, it is a great publicity stunt for the station. But Scott said: “I thought this unpaid bill was rather funny. I reckoned it would be great if I challenged my listeners to contribute to pay off this long-outstanding debt.”

After the re-entry, the San Francisco Examiner offered a $10,000 prize for the first piece of Skylab to be delivered to their offices. A 17-year-old lad, Stan Thornton, picked up some chunks from the roof of his home in Esperance and caught the first flight to San Francisco, where he collected his prize.

NASA Needs Strategic Plan to Manage Orbital Debris Efforts

Although NASA's meteoroid and orbital debris programs have responsibly used their resources, the agency's management structure has not kept pace with increasing hazards posed by abandoned equipment, spent rocket bodies, and other debris orbiting the Earth, says a new report by the National Research Council.

NASA should develop a formal strategic plan to better allocate resources devoted to the management of orbital debris.

In addition, removal of debris from the space environment or other actions to mitigate risks may be necessary.

The complexity and severity of the orbital debris environment combined with decreased funding and increased responsibilities have put new pressures on NASA, according to the report. Some scenarios generated by the agency's meteoroid and orbital debris models show that debris has reached a "tipping point," with enough currently in orbit to continually collide and create even more debris, raising the risk of spacecraft failures, the report notes.

In addition, collisions with debris have disabled and even destroyed satellites in the past; a recent near-miss of the International Space Station underscores the value in monitoring and tracking orbital debris as precisely as possible.

"The current space environment is growing increasingly hazardous to spacecraft and astronauts," said Donald Kessler, chair of the committee that wrote the report and retired head of NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office.

"NASA needs to determine the best path forward for tackling the multifaceted problems caused by meteoroids and orbital debris that put human and robotic space operations at risk."

The strategic plan NASA develops should provide a basis for prioritizing efforts and allocating funds to the agency's numerous meteoroid and orbital debris programs, the report says.

Currently, the programs do not have a single management and budget structure that can efficiently coordinate all of these activities. The programs are also vulnerable to changes in personnel, as nearly all of them are staffed by just one person.

The strategic plan, which should consider short- and long-term objectives, a schedule of benchmark achievements, and priorities among them, also should include potential research needs and management issues. The report lists these.

Removal of orbital debris introduces another set of complexities, the report adds, because only about 30 percent of the objects can be attributed to the United States.

"The Cold War is over, but the acute sensitivity regarding satellite technology remains," explained committee vice chair George Gleghorn, former vice president and chief engineer for the TRW Space and Technology Group.

Although NASA has identified the need for removing debris, the agency and U.S. government as a whole have not fully examined the economic, technological, political, and legal considerations, the report says.

The UK CubeSail: Tackling Space Debris

The first spacecraft designed to do away with itself was unveiled on Friday. It will try out an idea that could stop space getting clogged up with junk orbiting the Earth.

The debris of abandoned spacecraft and satellites is building up in low Earth orbit. This zero-g scrapheap has grown by 40 per cent in the past four years alone, with the US air force now tracking 19,000 orbiting objects larger than 10 centimetres across. And as chunks of debris strike each other, they fragment further – presenting still more threat of collision to working spacecraft.

The diminutive CubeSail craft, measuring 30 by 10 by 10 centimetres and weighing just 3 kilograms, has been designed at the Surrey Space Centre at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK. It has a solar sail that it can use for propulsion – harnessing the pressure of sunlight, just as a boat's sail harnesses the pressure of the wind – but it can also use the sail as an "orbital brake" to help it de-orbit to a fiery death in the atmosphere.

Space Junk Mess Getting Messier in Orbit

SPACE.com -- Space Junk Mess Getting Messier in Orbit

The already untidy mass of orbital debris that litters low Earth orbit nearly got nastier last month.

A head-on collision was averted between a spent upper stage from a Chinese rocket and the European Space Agency's (ESA) huge Envisat Earth remote-sensing spacecraft.

Space junk tracking information supplied by the U.S. military, as well as confirming German radar data, showed that the two space objects would speed by each other at a nail-biting distance of roughly 160 feet (50 meters).

ESA's Envisat tips the scales at 8 tons, with China's discarded rocket body weighing some 3.8 tons. A couple of tweaks of maneuvering propellant were used to nudge the large ESA spacecraft to a more comfortable miss distance.

But what if the two objects had tangled?

Such a space collision would have caused mayhem in the heavens, adding clutter to an orbit altitude where there are big problems already, said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the European Space Agency's Space Debris Office in Darmstadt, Germany.

It turns out, Klinkrad told SPACE.com, that 50 percent of all the close conjunctions that Envisat faces are due to the lethal leftovers from China's January 2007 anti-satellite test, as well as chunks of junk resulting from last year's smashup between an active U.S. Iridium satellite and a defunct Russian Cosmos spacecraft.

Klinkrad joined several orbital debris experts that took part in the 33rd Annual Guidance and Control Conference organized by the Rocky Mountain Section of the American Astronautical Society. The five-day meeting began Feb. 5.

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