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ISS dumps 2.9-ton battery, its largest discard ever
- eqvinox 6y agoI learned from this article that there is a non-metric ton :(. (The idea didn't even occur to me. The German school system taught me 1t=1000kg, and that's it.)
- jcims 6y agoIt’s worse than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_ton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_ton
- Symbiote 6y agoBritish English (and the SI standard) uses the spelling "tonne" to mean 1000kg, with "ton" meaning one of the obsolete units. American English prefers "metric ton", but they haven't obsoleted the old units. The ESA uses "tonne": https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Space_Debris/Space_debris_by_the_numbers https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Space_Debris/Space_debri... A "tun" is a type of barrel (Latin: tunna, German "Tonne"). One could contain roughly a tonne of liquid.
- squarefoot 6y ago"According to the European Space Agency, researchers estimate that Earth orbit is cluttered with about 34,000 debris objects at least 4 inches (10 centimeters) wide and 128 million pieces that are 1 millimeter across or larger." http://www.stuffin.space http://www.stuffin.space does a wonderful job of showing this by searching for "DEB" which is how debris is labeled. When technology will bring down costs, we will likely see a boom in orbit cleaning missions by private companies with their fleet of automated space drones wandering around, capturing objects, putting them in space litter boxes and throwing them either towards the Sun, or down to Earth or the Moon so they can be recycled.
- JaimeThompson 6y agoThey would have to be deorbited or possibly boosted to a higher orbit as the energy cost to send them into the sun, IIRC, is way too high.
- officialjunk 6y agoit is in fact less energy to send something at escape velocity out of the solar system from earth than to slow it down to to fall into the sun.
- leetcrew 6y agoonly a casual space enthusiast, but I don't really see how this is viable. if you want to reuse your cleaning drone, you pretty much have to match orbit with every single piece of debris you pick up. this seems like it would be prohibitively expensive in delta-v for the foreseeable future.
- whatisthiseven 6y agoWhy would private companies do this? Who is paying them and how would the cost structure work? Debris in orbit is not like trash on a field. It is moving at several km/s and is thousands of miles away. Good luck finding, intercepting, and then spending enough energy to de-orbit anything large, let alone tiny objects you can't see. I can't even imagine doing this millions of times.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoGround based debris tracking (military and private [Leo Labs]) can provide excellent rough estimates where orbital de orbiting systems should look to hone in on with sensors. From there, use lasers to ablate or push with photons direct debris to more optimal de orbit trajectories. Your cleanup volume is limited by the equipment service life and energy budget (more platforms, faster cleanup). You’re right a private company isn’t going to do this for free unless it’s to protect their own orbiting assets, and a sponsor or several would need to be found for this “commons cleanup”.
- stevep98 6y agoAn alternative to deorbiting all this junk would be to aggregate multiple smaller pieces into a single trash pile. You could sweep all the trash from a swath of orbit, and tie it all together. Next you attach a single rocket to provide an emergency manouvering capability. Eventually, decades from now, you send a recycling unit to reprocess all these highly refined materials into something useful.
- spicybright 6y agoJust tow normal trash bags behind it! I solved the space trash problem!