Clearing up our rubbish

It seems that wherever humans go they will always leave behind their rubbish and space is no exception to this rather depressing fact. Over 60 years of space activity has resulted in a great deal of space debris being left behind to float aimlessly in orbit around the Earth.

Current estimates indicate that there are almost 130 million objects in space of various shapes and sizes, ranging in size from a few millimetres to many metres and they can all prove hazardous. Amongst it all is known to be a glove lost by astronaut Ed White on the first American space-walk back in 1965. Even something as tiny as a fleck of paint, too small to be tracked, has the potential, when travelling at speeds of up to 17,500 mph, to cause damage. A number of space shuttle windows have had to be replaced because of paint fleck damage. And that’s just the small stuff.

Over 900,000 objects are considered big enough to damage or completely destroy entire spacecraft should they be involved in a collision. Objects like old satellites, spent rocket stages and fragments caused by their disintegration and collisions. In 2009, a defunct Russian satellite collided with and destroyed a functioning U.S. commercial satellite. The collision caused an extra 2,000 pieces of trackable debris to be added to the existing inventory of space rubbish.

NASA has well-established rules for tracking and dealing with possible collisions with such objects, including the most major of these, the evacuation of a space station. Debris avoidance manoeuvres are planned according to the probability of collision and the impact to mission objectives and risk to the crew. Over the last 10 years several collision avoidance manoeuvres have been conducted.

However the problem is not going to go away, in fact it will only get worse as more and more bits of space junk are added to what’s already up there. The only answer is to get rid of it. And that’s exactly what a 100kg satellite called RemoveDebris UK has been doing, by trialling a number of technologies that could be used in the future to deal with the clear up of space debris. The tests, using a harpoon and nets, have been successful and could open the door to a solution to the problem.

Simon Fellowes, from the Surrey Space Centre and manager of the consortium behind RemoveDebris said this, “As a university, we’ve given proof of concept for the basic ideas; we’ve shown the technology-readiness has reached a certain level. It’s now for industry to turn these concepts into a commercial product or business.”

Let’s hope that someone heeds his words and takes action before the very real prospect of space tourism becomes the norm, because that amount of debris floating about on the space highways is an accident waiting to happen.