If you think that your back yard is a mess with a serious need of junk clearance, why don’t you take a second to consider the state in which we have left not only the planet, but even space? Yes, space, like the cosmos outside the Earth’s atmosphere, where tons of man-made junk floats freely, restricted only by gravitation, thus forming something like the rings of Saturn around the planet.
This may sound like something that should not be a problem, but truth is that many of the everyday actions that you consider an integral part of your life – talking on the phone, using your GPS coordination in the car, watching life coverage of sports events from the other side of the world on the TV, depend heavily on the technology we send in space. And the air-crafts that carry that technology are seriously endangered by the millions of tons of man-made debris that gravitate around Earth at this moment.
The nature and type of that junk varies greatly. When talking about space garbage you might be talking about little freckles of paint, but you can also be talking about now defunct satellites or such that for some reason or another are currently inoperable, or the debris of crashes of man-made space objects like that old Soviet satellite and the American one just several years ago.
Even the slightest and most insignificantly looking pieces of trash like the speckles of paint may cause very serious damage to the solar cells of space-crafts. The paint, which pieces rarely exceed half a centimeter in diameter, has the ability to come together with other of its kind, forming massive balls of solid matter, sometimes weighting half a ton or even more, and these giant balls of paint speckles usually travel with speed exceeding 100 kilometers per hour. There is no need to explain what damage it may cause to the satellite that for example carries your conversations on the mobile phone if a collision occurs.
That is why all space agencies throughout the world are now looking into the issues of space junk removal. Waste management is a large enough issue here down on Earth, so you can imagine what problems a rubbish removal contractor is going to face in outer space.
Fortunately, more and more projects have now been brought to the attention of the specialists and some of them truly think that even if they have not come up with a permanent solution to the problem, they have been brought at least close to one. For example, there is one company that proposes a fleet of nano-satelites to be send out in space with the purpose of destroying debris. Another one thinks that low orbit debris can be destroyed by firing a laser from the territory of Australia. Orbiting robots, Electrodynamic Tether and a giant solar cube sail are among the other proposals. Sounds like science fiction? Well, there is a good reason for that – the future has already come and we have to face the challenges it brings to the table.
