Space Junk Debris Harpooning Talks Underway At Euro Space Agency
Source: inquisitr.com
Space debris, often called space junk, is a growing hazard in low-earth orbit. This week’s 6th European Conference on Space Debris is currently being held in Darmstadt, Germany to allow members of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the concerned public to address the problem of space junk leftover from the approximately 4,900 launches that have occurred from the beginning of the Space Age in the late 1950s through 2012.
The ESA said that the bulk of the space junk comes from two sources — 240 explosions in orbiting craft and “fewer than 10 known collisions” between two or more orbiting craft. They said that both American and European estimates agree that there are over 23,000 objects larger than 5 to 10 centimeters spinning around the earth at speeds of around 25,000 kilometers per hour.
Whew. That’s a lot of hazardous debris floating around.
One space technology company, Astrium, is proposing a specialized harpoon that can catch the estimated 6,000 tons of dangerous debris and remove it from low-earth orbit.
Astrium engineer Jaime Reed told CNN that the full proposal will be unveiled on Wednesday. In essence, though, the plan involves a so-called chase satellite that will deploy a tiny barbed harpoon to catch nuisance pieces of space junk so that they can be towed back toward the atmosphere. Small pieces of junk can then be dropped to burn up harmlessly as they fall through the air — similar to the way that small bits of space dust streak through the sky as meteors as they burn up before hitting the earth.
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Read the full article at: inquisitr.com
2012