Space Garbage

[Diana]

Orbital Debris a Growing Problem with No End in Sight

The proliferation of garbage in low Earth orbit has reached a point where it will increase in the coming decades even if all rocket launches were canceled starting now, according to research by NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

Arthur C. Clarke, who first discovered the virtues of geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometers above the equator for communications satellites, warned that space exploration is more likely to be shut down by low-orbit debris than by anything else.

I wonder if they will eventually come up with some kind of solution.


Diana

[Dragon Star]

Only solution would be is too go in a counter-orbit to the material, with a very strong trash bag and good aim.

[sunofsky]

is that garbage useful for recycle! few of its parts'

[Blue Fire]

How would space garbage increase if rocket launches are stopped and thus no new items being added? Would this be because of currently functional or useful stuff becoming useless due to aging or becoming obsolete or the result of decaying orbits? Does the International Space Station dump garbage out the window or what?

[stuart]

Originally Posted by Blue Fire

How would space garbage increase if rocket launches are stopped and thus no new items being added? Would this be because of currently functional or useful stuff becoming useless due to aging or becoming obsolete or the result of decaying orbits? Does the International Space Station dump garbage out the window or what?

I think it's two reasons that you stated: For one, as satellites die and no longer function, they just become junk. It costs money to de-orbit and so people just don't. Second, because there are debris in space, they can collide and chip parts off each other, creating more debris, even though you haven't actually increased the mass of the space junk.

The way I read that article, I think it's going for the latter, where we've reached a "critical density" of stuff up there such that the rate of collision and thus falling apart is greater than the rate of stuff falling back to Earth due to orbit decay.

[Blue Fire]

Space Junk trivia from
http://www.space.com/spacewatch/space_junk.html

The oldest debris still on orbit is the second US satellite, the Vanguard I, launched on 1958, March, the 17th, which worked only for 6 years.
In 1965, during the first american space walk, the Gemini 4 astronaut Edward White, lost a glove. For a month, the glove stayed on orbit with a speed of 28,000 km / h, becoming the most dangerous garment in history.
More than 200 objects, most of them rubbish bags, were released by the Mir space station during its first 10 years of operation.
The most space debris created by a spacecraft's destruction was due to the upper stage of a Pegasus rocket launched in 1994. Its explosion in 1996 generated a cloud of some 300,000 fragments bigger than 4 mm and 700 among them were big enough to be catalogued. This explosion alone doubled the Hubble Space Telescope collision risk.

[Blue Fire]

I'm not having much luck getting updated info on space junk. The websites I looked at had nothing later than 2004 articles. But I finally found this comment at:
http://nasaexplores.nasa.gov/show2_5...d=04-072&gl=58

Since the smallest pieces of debris cannot be tracked, collisions with them [spacecraft] are bound to happen. The Space Shuttle often returns to Earth with tiny impact craters. And, impacts can even create small cracks in the front windows! Even though the spacecraft run into this debris quite often, the debris rarely runs into other debris. If fact, we only know of one time where this actually happened!

Note: Brackets above are mine - I didn't want to quote the previous paragraphs that made this clear.

So, apparently the idea of junk running into other junk and thus creating more discrete pieces of junk is not a significant factor.