Courtesy NASA.
Image by Alessandro Dimai at the Col Druscie Observatory, Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, courtesy NASA.
Ugly. Here's how a particle wasted an experimental panel on the long-duration exposure facility.
Comet Hale-Bopp made quite a splash in the night sky back in 1996. Debris from comets is one hazard to spacecraft.
Space junkies
A major source of space junk in the future could be tests of anti-missile systems, designed to obliterate entire warheads. Ironically, space junk apparently skewered a Minuteman missile that disappeared from radar screens over the Pacific Ocean in January, 1998. The missile was testing components of star wars (see "Missile Destruction..." in the bibliography).
So how to reduce the threat from space junk? We ransacked low-Earth orbit to find these suggestions:
Space cadets have been worrying about space debris at least since 1983 when a particle containing aluminum and titanium cratered the Space Shuttle's front window. (Both metals are widely used in spacecraft.) According to a former astronaut who directed a National Research Council study of junk and shuttle safety, "the hazard from meteoroids and orbital debris is, on some missions, the single greatest threat to the shuttle and crew."
Don't make it. Space junk can be prevented with tethers that restrain bolts, lens caps and other stuff from drifting away. Slowing satellites and booster rockets after they serve their purpose would cause them to enter the atmosphere and burn up. (Everything in low Earth orbit will eventually burn up, it's just a matter of time.)
Use the "Terminator Tether." This three-mile aluminum wire, developed by a Washington State firm, would be uncoiled from a dying satellite. Interaction with the Earth's magnetic field would generate current, slowing the satellite and drawing it into the atmosphere. The system is scheduled for a test on a Russian rocket in 2000.
Stay away from it. The U.S. military operates the Space Surveillance Network (SSN), which notifies crewed spacecraft when they are in danger from a large piece of space junk. The system, however, is not perfect. "Probably more than 95 percent of the objects that could cause critical damage to the [space shuttle] are not cataloged because they are too small to be reliably detected by the SSN detectors," wrote the National Research Council group.
Zap it with a laser. That, seriously, was a proposal of Project Orion, that would presumably use equipment developed for Star Wars -- the anti-missile project.
Read all about it in the spaced-out bibliography.
