[Ground-station] Debris Mitigation - call for comments

[KENT BRITAIN]

 Hard to hit them from the optimal angle.
There is a lot of bending and scattering of the light when near the horizon. 
On 10 GHz EME we have seen the optical and radio moon to be as much as 1.5 degrees apart. 
This diffraction gives us a beautiful sunsets, but makes it hard to hit a small 
target.   Best time is of course when the target is directly overhead, but nowit is being pushed higher.    Certainly make it's orbit more elliptical, but not 
sure it would bring it down.   Kent
Plan B   Increase your light source 30 or 40 dB and turn it into a plasma.

    On Thursday, September 24, 2020, 1:08:28 AM CDT, Bruce Perens <bruce at perens.com> wrote:  
 
 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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