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‘Space cleaner’ satellite spotted grabbing and throwing away old satellite
- FridayoLeary 5y agoIt's a Chinese satellite and it's obviously worrying the US because it can theoretically be used to interfere with their military satellites.
- jcims 5y agoThis seems like something that would be almost trivial to develop once you have basic orbital stationkeeping capability. The challenge with the trash tug use case is you want your spacecraft to survive engaging a randomly tumbling object with a mass that could be substantially greater than its own. You don’t need that if you just want to interfere. I would be very surprised if strategic DoD satellites didn't have some kind of close-in defense capability to ward off any vehicles sniffing about.
- adhesive_wombat 5y agoMeanwhile the X-37 is doing...whatever it is it does.
- aqme28 5y agoThere are much simpler ways to destroy enemy satellites. You wouldn't necessarily go out of your way to gently decommission them.
- drorco 5y agoPretty cool exercise. I wonder why governments are concerned over military use with this technology. If anyone wanted to bring a satellite down, wouldn't it be easier to just blow it up with a projectile/hack it/jam it/laser it? The military option of developing a complicated satellite robot to push satellites off orbit sounds stupid.
- vidanay 5y agoThe debris could pose a danger to their own satellites.
- lazide 5y agoProbably too energetically intense, but what if it pushed a junk satellite into one of their military satellites? Also, there have been rumors that a number of ‘dead’ satellites are actually spy satellites using the ‘dead’ status as cover, which maybe this could make no longer tenable with some plausible deniability?
- krona 5y agoPlausible deniability.
- colechristensen 5y agoYou can’t shoot down very many satellites until you poison the orbits with debris that knocks out all satellites. If you can grab and deorbit a satellite, you can also grab it and steal it to learn its secrets.
- daniel-cussen 5y agoPlus they're loaded with really good materials. I know little, but one example is gold in the welds--for satellites, and only for satellites, some contact or weld is done with 80% gold, 20% tin, which is the best for corrosion, some special qualities. Also heat foil is solid gold. But only on satellites.
- joshvm 5y agoYou’re right about some of the contacts, but the foil on the outside is similar to mylar, a plastic-based aluminised film. https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/good-gold-are-satellites-covered-gold-foil https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/good-gold-are-satellites-co...
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
- greyface- 5y agoThe ExoAnalytic video mentioned in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDCLpXCB62w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDCLpXCB62w
- dmd 5y agoWhat is with the bizarre robotic voiceover? Extremely unsettling.
- skhr0680 5y agoI know an Indian guy who uses it in every video because he doesn't want people to make fun of his accent
- sbarre 5y agoI've started to notice a lot more videos using TTS voices for narration, presumably because the quality of said voices is increasing. Increasing "enough" is subjective of course. It could be that the creator doesn't feel confident recording themselves doing the voiceover, regardless of nationality. Or they are recording the video in many different languages and it's easier/cheaper to get text translated than to find voice talent in multiple languages.
- BEEdwards 5y agoHe's trading possible accent issues for me (and a lot of people) refusing to watch the video. If your video has a robotic voice I assume it's spam, worse the voice is so annoying that I won't stay around long enough to find out otherwise.
- formvoltron 5y agowow cool.
- xunn0026 5y agoThis would be a great US engineering accomplishment but it's a terrible Chinese accomplishment because it may be used in war. As if the US is not capable of and eager to weaponise absolutely everything! This shows China is ahead in the space race.
- JaimeThompson 5y agoI'm not sure that using a single data point is a valid way to determine who is "ahead".
- ethbr0 5y agoI think it's undeniable to say "the Chinese space program is progressing at a faster rate than NASA." But, it's also starting from farther behind. But, it's also starting with more modern technology. But, it's also working under a command economy. And that's not including US private space companies. Read: SpaceX.
- JaimeThompson 5y agoIf we limit it to just Earth science NASA appears to be ahead. https://essp.nasa.gov/earth-pathfinder-quests/projects/active-missions/ https://essp.nasa.gov/earth-pathfinder-quests/projects/activ... If we include space telescopes, missions on and around other planets, space weather monitoring, solar exploration, and such NASA appears to be ahead. Saying "progressing at a fast rate than NASA" is just word games since they start from such a lower level and doesn't reflect the reality on the ground. EDIT: I provided the above as supporting evidence not to start an argument.
- pphysch 5y agoGPS vs. BeiDou Arecibo vs. FAST China recently deployed their own Space Station and Mars Rover, etc... Political and ideological biases aside, it's pretty obvious which space program has more vitality in the current decade. Both sides certainly have novel tech, but what about the bigger trends?
- sdoering 5y agoWow. In the beginning I found the article interesting before (in my subjective eyes) it turned into a thinly veiled Anti-China propaganda piece. But I have to admit as a propaganda piece it was done quite well. Pull interested readers in letting them swallow the hook. Then broaden the scope to tell the reader that other, more US friendly nations are currently either testing the concept or planning something in the future. While not pointing out that the US seemingly do not to have cleanup missions planned. Then question your own propaganda in a not very believable manner but still in the end leave the reader doubting the intentions of the Chinese. Mission accomplished. The best part: Try to find on the site who is behind that publication. No imprint. Nothing about the editorial team. Nothing about the company. I actually don't trust media outlets that don't tell who the are. But that might just be my German upbringing where media is being required by law to disclose at least the company and the editorial board/staff. ----- Update for transparency reasons as separate part Having read about the publication behind this site I admit that they seem to be one of the better structures in media all over the world. I recommend reading about the reason why it was founded [0]. Still the piece per se irks me. But I give the the benefit of the doubt and would not call it propaganda anymore. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_%28India%29?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_%28India%29?wprov=sfl...
- JaimeThompson 5y agoDoesn't this provide the information you need? https://thewire.in/about-us https://thewire.in/about-us
- sdoering 5y agoI was not able (on mobile) to find that link. I looked at DuckDuckGo and read up on them.
- JaimeThompson 5y agoThe disaster that is mobile "optimizations" strikes again. Sigh.
- 5y ago
- dracodoc 5y agoAnother explanation might be dispose the old one before it was captured by other countries, otherwise the potential harm could be too great.
- sharmin123 5y ago
- mattlondon 5y agoAs a random thought experiment, would a spacex starship with some sort of unfolding kilometre-scale "net" (made of aerogel or whatever) be able to effectively sweep common orbital planes for the microscopic bits of crap floating around? Then furl the net all back up in the cargo bay, land and recycle/dispose of the debris? I am guessing - given that starship is planned to be able to go to mars - that there is enough fuel and power available that it'd be fairly trivial to just scoop up defunct satellites in the huge cargo hold and deorbit them safely for refurbishment/disposal on the ground. (After all they've shown they can rendevous with ISS etc so I am guessing this is largely the same approach to rendevous with a dead satellite) Guessing you could comfortably hold quite a few satellites inside a starship meaning one launch could collect a whole range of dead satellites?
- sparker72678 5y agoA few problems holding a solution like that back right now: 1) It takes a ton of fuel to change your orbit once you're in space, and space is _really_ big (even just the orbital ranges we're talking about). It's just not currently feasible for a ship like that to capture debris and then use _more_ fuel to bring it back down. 2) Relative velocities of some debris are so large (and they are so spread out) that it's not yet feasible to capture it and bring it back with any current approach. Dead satellites are mostly dangerous for the scattered debris they _might_ become if something hits them/they bread up. So while bringing them back is important, it's not as immediate a danger as things that have already broken up. Basically, we don't have any approach that would make a major difference, even if money was no object (which it is).
- amelius 5y agoIt's probably easier to remove all pastic junk from the great pacific garbage patch, where stuff doesn't move around at relativistic speeds.
- modeless 5y agoIt's not even close to feasible IMO. These pieces of debris are traveling many times faster than bullets and they have significant mass. They would rip aerogel to shreds. You would need square kilometers of bulletproof armor. Imagine a project to catch all the fish in the ocean except the ocean is a million times bigger, the fish are going as fast as bullets, and every fishing trawler costs a billion dollars. And you can't sell the fish to fund it. Retrieving whole defunct satellites is possible but only one or two at a time because of the huge amount of fuel needed to match orbits with each one. And once you've grabbed one it takes even more fuel to de-orbit it (which you'll notice didn't happen here). Don't forget that every maneuver you make as a spacecraft has to use extra fuel just to haul all the fuel for every future maneuver you'll ever do, and that compounds for every lifetime maneuver. It's worthwhile to dispose of old satellites so they don't collide and produce debris clouds that are basically impossible to clean forever, but it's not funded.
- nytesky 5y agoPerhaps they are making amends after their missile test and it’s debris generating aftermath? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/science/china-debris-space-station.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/science/china-debris-spac...
- dmead 5y agoThis will be a fun cat and mouse game when sats are rigged to catch one of these and explode.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago"China clears space junk, but at what cost?!"