Posted on 03/18/2018 11:16:43 AM PDT by BenLurkin
One of the most intriguing efforts is spearheaded by Airbus, and its target is the biggest hunk of junk in orbit — Envisat, the largest Earth observation satellite ever launched, weighing more than eight tons. The company wants to corral the floating behemoth with a giant space harpoon, and then drag it down into the atmosphere, where it will burn up on reentry.
According to the BBC, the harpoon is currently being developed in England, and a small prototype will be tested during next month’s RemoveDebris mission. “If we can design a harpoon that can cope with Envisat, then it should be able to cope with all other types of spacecraft including the many rocket upper-stages that remain in orbit,” said project engineer Alastair Wayman.
Envisat, launched in 2002, was a state-of-the-art observation platform bristling with instrumentation including imaging radar, spectrometers, and atmospheric sensors. The European Space Agency (ESA) unexpectedly lost contact with the satellite in 2012. Despite numerous attempts to resurrect it, the mission was declared officially dead shortly thereafter.
The relative simplicity of the harpoon is what appeals to engineers. “Many of these targets will be tumbling and if you were to use a robotic arm, say, that involves a lot of quite complex motions to follow your target,” Wayman explained. “Whereas, with the harpoon, all you have to do is sit a distance away, wait for the target to rotate underneath you, and at the right moment fire your harpoon.”
Envisat is the long-term goal of the space harpoon project — its great white whale, as it were — but test missions in the next few years will focus on smaller targets. April’s RemoveDebris demo mission will release a small target from the satellite and then attempt to retrieve it using the harpoon.
(Excerpt) Read more at digitaltrends.com ...
Could nuking the orbital junk do the job for a lot of junk?
Aim a solar cooker on it and vaporize it.
Turn it into dust and we’ll have a spectacular meteor display!
Is it a space station or a satellite ?
I don’t remember the Euro-peons launching a space station. Must have been a top secret spy operation.
Thar she blows! We got her inthe her reactor core. Don’t worry about the radio active fallout.
Try using a giant cue stick instead and take out more than one sat at a time. 8 ball in the side pocket.
Airbus IS an expert on bringing large objects down to earth.
Launch rockets in a parabolic orbit that release a tank full of hydrogen. The hydrogen will spread out into a gigantic cloud. Orbiting debris will go through the cloud, and in colliding with the hydrogen, slow down a bit. Usually the cloud will be so dispersed that a few hydrogen atoms hitting a working satellite will not destroy it. But everything that gets hit by hydrogen will slow down in its orbit, gradually bringing everything back down to Earth over time after repeated collisions with the hydrogen.
Somehow, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy comes immediately to my mind.
Another ESA success story! :^) Ironically, the Envirosat may have been disabled by a collision with space debris.
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