[Ground-station] Debris Mitigation - call for comments

[Bruce Perens]

What about deorbiting them with light pressure? Keep them in one piece and
give them a little push every day.

On Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 9:57 PM KENT BRITAIN via Ground-Station
<ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute> wrote:

> I am pretty sure these LASERS would not leave any small pieces!
>
> Well, maybe a few atoms might stick together.     Kent
>
> On Wednesday, September 23, 2020, 11:41:14 PM CDT, Phil Karn via
> Ground-Station <ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute> wrote:
>
>
> On 9/23/20 14:33, Jeff WE4B via Ground-Station wrote:
> > I wonder how well the laser ‘pulverized’ these objects in orbit. It’s
> > a very interesting solution. Something will have to be done soon to
> > mitigate all of the objects that we have inserted into orbit. If I had
> > venture capital money, I would partner with Bob McGwier and try to
> > figure out a solution.
>
> I wonder the same thing. Breaking up one big piece of debris into a
> whole bunch of smaller pieces of debris that are harder to track only
> makes the problem much worse.
>
> A somewhat more promising use of lasers would be not to break up these
> objects but to ablate them strongly enough to provide some delta V to
> kick them into lower, shorter-lived orbits. But I'm still skeptical.
>
> I do have one totally wild idea for clearing out parts of LEO. Lob a
> suborbital device into LEO space. When it gets there, it rapidly deploys
> a big ball of something like polyurethane foam in the path of a cloud of
> orbital debris. The ball does NOT need to actually capture the debris,
> it only needs to exchange enough momentum to bring down the debris
> particle after it passes through. The ball itself, lacking orbital
> momentum, soon falls out of the sky.
>
> I got this idea while reading about the use of small pieces of aerogel
> to capture (admittedly tiny) comet particles moving at relative
> velocities of 50 km/s or so, much higher than the ~7 km/s in LEO.
>
> One problem with this scheme -- and the laser -- is that they look too
> much like antisatellite weapons. Which they are. There needs to be a
> treaty completely banning intentional creation of long-lived orbital
> debris, specifically including antisatellite weapon tests, but with
> exceptions for systems designed to remove debris as opposed to creating
> it. As long as the debris owners don't object, of course.
>
>
> --Phil
>
>
>
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