What ever happened to the "Right Stuff"?
Don't the Americans have a astronaut ready to do an E.V.A. equipped with a baseball bat?
The scheduled undocking of the ESA’s automated transfer vehicle (ATV) from the International Space Station (ISS) is being delayed as NASA and Russian managers prepare for a possible “debris avoidance maneuver” on Thursday. NASA has announced that the ATV’s engines may be needed to execute the maneuver, should it be required. …
I contend that the only way to effectively deal with space debris is with a giant frickin laser.
That way, the first bit of space debris to cross the ISS path could be blasted to smithereens and made an example of to others.
I would also accept a swarm of micro satellites as a solution for the job.
The trouble with that approach is that you end up with lots of smithereens in orbit... Unless you can actually guarantee to blast them down to whatever tiny size is so small that you can ignore it (and I have a feeling, but could be wrong, that means well under the size of an average grain of sand) then what you are doing is in many respects making things worse.
Actually, I believe that ablating part of a chunk of debris with a laser would impart some delta-v to the chunk in question. Vaporising or blowing up a chunk of debris would be an unfeasible solution. But providing enough thrust with laser to either knock it out of orbit, or knock it off course enough to miss the station is entirely doable. You use the laser to provide power, and the debris itself is it's own reaction mass.
I think that there are rocket engines based on the idea of firing a powerful laser from a distance to ablate material from the back of a space ship in order to provide it with thrust.
You beat me to it. Thinking about it a bit more, though, you're counting on targetting a suitable bit of debris sticking out in the right place at the right angle, which would complicate things - without that you'll just set the junk spinning.
"And what about jet-packs, I want a jet-pack! It does not even need antigravity, for goodness' sake (or slood for that matter)"
Here ya go... just needs a large enough body of water to fly over.
http://www.jetlev-flyer.com/
WARNING: Annoying, loud music courtesy of some stupid market type.
It doesn't actually specifically say that in the article and in the article that the linked-to article links to it suggest that NASA at one point thought there might be damage to the thread in the hole, but it's inconclusive. Either way it's still not exactly a big deal. They used a bit of wire and a toothbrush to clean it, woopedy-f**king-doo. Had they re-threaded or heli-coiled the hole I'd be more impressed. By the sounds of it they had mounting posts though ("receptacle posts"), which to me implies a bolt with a threaded hole in it, like motherboard posts, so they wouldn't necessarily have had to do it in-situ.
As an aside, Firefox delightfully suggest "on-site" as a correction for in-situ.
Still feeling smarmy?
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Serious suggestions have been made about how to clean up orbital junk. You'd need orbiting robot craft that would match orbit with each piece of junk and deal with it. You won't want to take the junk on board because that means you'd need more fuel for the next orbital rondezvous, and soon you'd be out of fuel.
The manouvering would use a low-thrust high-efficiency electrically-powered thuster such as VASIMR. When it matched orbit with a piece of junk it would attach a very lightweight "parachute". Something to maximise drag with respect to the very thin atmosphere or solar wind up there. This would cause the piece of junk to de-orbit over a number of years, ending with it re-entering and burning up.
Sort of like a fleet of orbiting Roombas!
A sound concept, except a lot of the (detectable) crap up there is only a couple of inches across, making recovery tricky and high cost. And getting hit by a metallic object at 500 m/sec is gonna do damage whether it's 2 inches or 20 feet in size.
And thus the NASA dilema on how to clean it all up.
The article mentions "tracking data shows an object “edging inside” what it calls the “red zone” of proximity to the space station".
Surely an object that is just "edging inside" this zone around the ISS is of no threat. I thought the problem was pieces of debris that arrive at orbital speeds (relative to ISS)?
Or do they mean that the orbital path of these objects (that are moving very fast relative to ISS) are starting to slowly creep into the "red-zone"?
"Edging in" refers to the orbit approaching the ISS. Although, even a slow moving object is a problem. You don't want it stuck in your air lock doors or engine nozzles.
No doubt other collisions can knock parts closer to the station. Are they going to wait till it gets too close? No, they deal with it now when they still have time. Or things such as solar winds can effect it AFAIK. Not sure how much it effect the orbit though.