Official News page 6

REAL LIFE NEWS: NEW PLAN TO CLEAR THE SPACE JUNK

by Hazed

I've talked in the past about how space junk is becoming a real menace, with the Earth's orbit littered with all kinds of rubbish. Now Italian scientists have come up with a plan to deal with it.

They want to build a robotic satellite which will grapple the junk, attach a propellant kit and send it to its death in the Earth's atmosphere.

The team from the Italian space agency (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana) have identified over 60 major threats which are about 850km up. Two-thirds of these are over three tonnes each, and many are moving at quite a rate - up to 16,800 mph. That makes them pretty hazardous to other satellites. 41 are designated as priority targets because they are in similar orbits so could collide with each other, causing even more problems. Some of these are dead and defunct satellites which have come to their end of their useful life but are still up there in orbit; others are discarded rocket bodies which don't contain any sensitive equipment.

The scientists say the plan they have come up with could effectively deal with 35 of these rocket bodies over seven years.

This is all just theoretical: it's going to take a lot of money and a lot of political haggling to turn an article in a journal into reality. But it does need to be tackled or it will get more and more difficult to launch anything into orbit without it hitting something else.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/09/space_junk/

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page