4 ms·
I imagine your tanks as a little speck in the center of a 100 meter foam doughnut. but i guess it really depends on what the debris is like. I'd guess most woul
by jfoutz 11y ago
I imagine your tanks as a little speck in the center of a 100 meter foam doughnut. but i guess it really depends on what the debris is like. I'd guess most would be with a few hundred m/s, faster would rise and slower would fall, right? Not sure how much kinetic energy could be converted to breaking chemical bonds.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoThe problem is with debris on different orbits than yours. If you're on an equatorial and there's a debris on an elliptical polar one and you happen to meet near its periapsis, that could easily amount to 10km/s of speed difference. And don't get me started on retrograde orbits.
- jfoutz 11y agoOh! right. yeah. T-boned. thanks for the clarification.
- trhway 11y agothe faster the object, the more energy it has. How about collecting that energy? Your delta-V is my joules so to speak. The space junk is (and probably will be) mostly metal, and there probably some ways to collect the energy, like magnetic traps, etc... (the idea inspired by my Prius brake regeneration :)
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoInteresting idea. However, I doubt it can work, because for it to work, you have to be close to the debris. (You're probably facing some kind of inverse-square-law here.) But you don't want to get very close to space debris that can close on you at those kinds of speeds (I believe the GP from me meant 10K km/sec, rather than 10 km/sec.) It's going to be really hard to guarantee a miss and still get close enough to collect energy...
- TeMPOraL 11y ago> I believe the GP from me meant 10K km/sec, rather than 10 km/sec. I meant 10 km/s; LEO orbital velocity is around 7 km/s and in the example I took into account that you can go faster at those altitudes if your orbit is elliptical. Double the velocity if one of the object is orbiting retrograde instead of polar. Adjust accordingly for other relative inclinations. Is there any reason I should be off by 3 orders of magnitude?
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago> Is there any reason I should be off by 3 orders of magnitude? No. I was - I was thinking km/hr rather than km/sec, and 10 km/hr was clearly far too low. My error. 10K km/sec is 0.03c. It's not a velocity that will remain in earth orbit.
- baq 11y agowrong: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10km%2Fs+%2F+speed+of+light http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10km%2Fs+%2F+speed+of+l... 3.336×10^-5 1000km/s is enough to escape the galaxy (in fact, about 2 times more than needed. it's ridiculously fast.) 0.03c is 8990 km/s.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoYou gave it the wrong number because you missed on letter. We were talking about 10 K km/s (10000 km/s), not 10 km/s.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoArgh. You missed one letter. (And so did I.)
- TeMPOraL 11y agoLike 'AnimalMuppet explains, the tricky part is to get close and not get hit, given that you have to maintain the speed difference to extract the energy. Also, I don't think the process will be energetically-viable; you still need to get close to orbital velocity yourself to be able to catch the stuff even if you didn't intend for the garbage can to stay in orbit, and if you do want it in orbit, navigating it around will most likely burn orders of magnitude more energy that you'll be able to retrieve.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoI agree its an interesting idea, but there are few ways to convert high kinetic energy into something usable. On suggestion was a jello like, self healing sphere of ballistic gel or something, that would convert kinetic energy into heat, and then radiate the heat as a form of thrust. We're talking very inefficient though.