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I prefer having technology to vaporize rather than collect. But if we have the technology, just a scanning tractor beam to collect the debris. My guess is it'

I prefer having technology to vaporize rather than collect. But if we have the technology, just a scanning tractor beam to collect the debris. My guess is it'll all be too primitive for any reuse. So collecting it with a beam, then projecting it in a sun-seeking trajectory by reversing the beam.

dvtrn 7y ago
I prefer having technology to vaporize rather than collect. The ESA is putting a lot of focused attention behind this very thing, to certain extents [0] [0] https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc7/paper/717/SDC7-paper717.pdf https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc7/paper/7...
- fennecfoxen 7y ago
  Only for breaking up satellites already approaching the atmosphere, though.
fennecfoxen 7y ago
"Vaporizing" a satellite is a misleading concept which draws on atmospheric analogies that do not hold up. A satellite is made out of metal and such things. You can heat that metal hot enough to melt it, but then its structural integrity will fail, and the liquid will disperse into a cloud of metal droplets while other satellite-parts drift away. When the metal droplets cool off, they will still remain in about the same orbit. This does not make an impact with any of these droplets particularly safe. Transporting the amount of energy to properly vaporize metal is also problematic and expensive. We do not possess tractor beam technology. Our tractors on this planet all use mechanical linkages. If we did have tractor beam technology, powering it would remain a problem.
- wahern 7y ago
  We do possess optical tractor beam technology: > However, about 10 years ago, researchers found that the object may experience an optical pulling force (OPF) toward the source direction when illuminated by an unfocused beam, such as a diffraction-free (nondiffraction) Bessel beam, which is named an optical tractor beam (OTB). Although it seems counterintuitive, OPF has been theoretically proved and experimentally demonstrated within recent years, as will be reviewed in this paper. Source: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/advanced-photonics/volume-1/issue-2/024001/Photonic-tractor-beams-a-review/10.1117/1.AP.1.2.024001.full?SSO=1 https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/advanced-photoni... Although, there's a lot of distance to cover between the current state-of-the-art and actually capturing orbital debris.

dvtrn 7y ago

I prefer having technology to vaporize rather than collect. The ESA is putting a lot of focused attention behind this very thing, to certain extents [0] [0] https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc7/paper/717/SDC7-paper717.pdf https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc7/paper/7...

fennecfoxen 7y ago
Only for breaking up satellites already approaching the atmosphere, though.

fennecfoxen 7y ago

"Vaporizing" a satellite is a misleading concept which draws on atmospheric analogies that do not hold up. A satellite is made out of metal and such things. You can heat that metal hot enough to melt it, but then its structural integrity will fail, and the liquid will disperse into a cloud of metal droplets while other satellite-parts drift away. When the metal droplets cool off, they will still remain in about the same orbit. This does not make an impact with any of these droplets particularly safe. Transporting the amount of energy to properly vaporize metal is also problematic and expensive. We do not possess tractor beam technology. Our tractors on this planet all use mechanical linkages. If we did have tractor beam technology, powering it would remain a problem.

wahern 7y ago
We do possess optical tractor beam technology: > However, about 10 years ago, researchers found that the object may experience an optical pulling force (OPF) toward the source direction when illuminated by an unfocused beam, such as a diffraction-free (nondiffraction) Bessel beam, which is named an optical tractor beam (OTB). Although it seems counterintuitive, OPF has been theoretically proved and experimentally demonstrated within recent years, as will be reviewed in this paper. Source: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/advanced-photonics/volume-1/issue-2/024001/Photonic-tractor-beams-a-review/10.1117/1.AP.1.2.024001.full?SSO=1 https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/advanced-photoni... Although, there's a lot of distance to cover between the current state-of-the-art and actually capturing orbital debris.