Japan to test self-destructing satellite to shrink space junk with string and an inanimate carbon blob Japan’s space agency (JAXA) has announced plans to test a self-destructing satellite in the hope of commercialising the technology so the proliferating fleet of low-orbit kit doesn’t become junk. The tech involved was developed with Japanese sat-killer startup ALE Co. and sounds simple: satellites will be equipped with a …
So if you reverse the polarity, you could speed up and hence raise the orbit of a satellite using electricity? Sounds cool.
Obviously I've over simplified. You might have to modulate and pulsate at the right moments and have the tether face the other way to achieve the end goal, but it seems plausible to, in effect, use the earth's magnetic field for this "motor".
Yes. There's a long and detailed Wikipedia article on the subject, which cleared up some confusion for me.
It would be handy though if there were a way to get current from one end of the tether to the other without that return conductor being influenced by the magnetic field without having to rely on a plasma to transfer electrons... I wondered about a coaxial cable, in which the current might be induced in the outer but not the inner, but that's way outside my area of expertise.
I thought the idea of a coaxial cable was to have zero net electromagnetic effect. The central core has its field centred at the centre (obviously) and because the outer sheath surrounds the centre the outer sheath also has its total field centred in exactly the same spot. So when one is positive and the other is negative the total is zero.
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You are aware that the recoverable resources from any satellite in low earth orbit would be massively dwarfed by the cost of sending up something to recapture them, right?
Or where you thinking that the satellites should all be designed with heat shields (massive weight add on - upping the amount of fuel you need to get into orbit), so that they can deorbit on their own? Yes because the thought of a satellite (even a cubesat) undergoing an uncontrolled deorbit and making it back to the surface of the Earth at Mach 10+ is not a truly terrifying thought.
I hate to burst your bubble but there already are Skynet satellites...... and they predate anything James Cameron has done on the subject.
A satellite is whizzing round at a considerable speed - its basically falling to earth all the time and missing, the energy (and thus fuel) required to perfectly synchronise a 'catcher' with a cubesat and return it would be massive.
As to the elements being lost - 15000 tons of micrometeors strike the earth - every year. We are not going to run out of metal by sending a few KG into space. Given that each launch of each flight of microsattelite likely costs the guts of a ton in metal to send up (obviously not on reusable rockets) - then there is more sent up than is put in orbit. Reusable tech makes sense for the rockets themselves - not so much for the payloads.
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