Blasting away space junk with freakin' lasers

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Tiny bits of space junk are continuously orbiting the Earth, and you can imagine this is dangerous for spacewalking astronauts. So, an international team of scientists has recently developed a blueprint for cleaning up the mess with a high-powered laser, according to a new report in the journal Acta Astronautica.

The space junk system brings together a super-wide field-of-view telescope and a newly developed laser system to follow space debris and take them out of orbit. The telescope, called EUSO, was originally developed by the Japanese research institute RIKEN to detect the effects of ultra-high energy cosmic rays entering the atmosphere at night.

“We realized,” said Toshikazu Ebisuzaki, who led the project, “that we could put it to another use. During twilight, thanks to EUSO’s wide field of view and powerful optics, we could adapt it to the new mission of detecting high-velocity debris in orbit near the ISS.”

Lasers + space – space junk = awesome

The CAN laser system that the space junk system would use was originally created to power particle accelerators. The laser is able to produce powerful and rapid laser pulses via of bundles of optical fibers working together.

The new method incorporating these two instruments will be able to track down and take out what scientists consider to be the most dangerous space debris, which are about size of one centimeter. The strong laser beam centered on the debris will generate high-velocity plasma reaction capable of reducing the debris’ orbital velocity and causing it to reenter the earth’s atmosphere. Dude. Sweet.

A small proof-of-concept experiment, comprised of a small version of the EUSO telescope and a laser with 100 fibers, is set to be deployed to the ISS.

“If that goes well,” said Ebisuzaki, “we plan to install a full-scale version on the ISS, incorporating a three-meter telescope and a laser with 10,000 fibers, giving it the ability to deorbit debris with a range of approximately 100 kilometers (62 miles). Looking further to the future, we could create a free-flyer mission and put it into a polar orbit at an altitude near 800 kilometers (500 miles), where the greatest concentration of debris is found.”

“Our proposal is radically different from the more conventional approach that is ground based, and we believe it is a more manageable approach that will be accurate, fast, and cheap,” Ebisuzaki said. “We believe that this dedicated system could remove most of the centimeter-sized debris within five years of operation.”

—–

Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.

redOrbit.com
offers Science, Space, Technology, Health news, videos, images and
reference information. For the latest science news, space news,
technology news, health news visit redOrbit.com frequently. Learn
something new every day.”