I couldn't really think of a clever title for this one so I just capitolized it to make it slightly more intense.
So we had a presentation in class last week about the construction of little cube satellites last week (which was awesome). These satillites are very cheap and can be brought into space exponentially cheaper than a normal satillite and in large numbers. However this brings up the question.... What if they break.... The answer was essentially they will probably be left there (that's what I remember, please correct me if I'm wrong). I then was browsing through space.com and I saw an article on recycling space junk to make new satellites! I then thought "oh my, tis a sign MrAstrowhat, we must do a blog on space junk"!!!!
The American Military Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on something called project Pheonix in which they want to create a robotic vehicle to retrieve the old antennas from old satellites and attach them on new ones so that they can be used once again. Actually, they specifically want to attach them to nanosatellites (which made me think of the in class presentation). I think this is a fantastic way to start recycling the dead material that is floating around our planet and just taking up space.
This will also continue to save money. The nanosatellites, as I said before, are very cheap to piggyback into space. Antenna are a whole different barrel of monkies, they are rather bulky and cost quite a bit of money so if we are able to use the working ones that are already in space..... Much money will be saved!!! Yay!!!!
There are some problems with this however. Satellites in Earths orbit were not made with the idea that they would be taken apart again so disassembling the satellite via robot could be difficult.
But yeah, I thought this was pretty awesome because we JUST had a presentation on nanosatellites. I wonder if they know anything about this?
-MrAstrowhat
Space debris is definitely a growing concern! It makes me wonder that if the space elevator is ever completed, we may be able to 'harvest' and 'recycle' these old satellites and spacecraft parts. Or we may have to wait until there is an actual space dock where we may use space debris to create new spaceships. But unfortunately in the short term, I don't see a way of recycling the space debris. I am a little skeptical about the robot idea. The amount of fuel and propulsion needed for a robot to chase after space debris will probably prevent such a design of a robot from maturing. Perhaps the best short term idea is to somehow shoot powerful magnets through the atmosphere and out into space, and on the way hopefully picking up a great deal with space debris (and hopefully doesn't affect the orbits of operational satellites as well).
ReplyDelete