<
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/27/1089065/first-mission-dead-rocket/>
"More than 9,000 metric tons of human-made metal and machinery are orbiting
Earth, including satellites, shrapnel, and the International Space Station. But
a significant bulk of that mass comes from one source: the nearly a thousand
dead rockets that have been discarded in space since the space age began.
Now, for the first time, a mission has begun to remove one of those dead
rockets. Funded by the Japanese space agency JAXA, a spacecraft from the
Japanese company Astroscale was launched on Sunday, February 18, by the New
Zealand firm Rocket Lab and is currently on its way to rendezvous with such a
rocket in the coming weeks. It’ll inspect it and then work out how a follow-up
mission might be able to pull the dead rocket back into the atmosphere. If it
succeeds, it could demonstrate how we could remove large, dangerous, and
uncontrolled pieces of space junk from orbit—objects that could cause a
monumental disaster if they collided with satellites or spacecraft.
“It cannot be overstated how important this is,” says Michelle Hanlon, a space
lawyer at the University of Mississippi. “We have these ‘debris bombs’ just
sitting up there waiting to be hit.”
A fine handed to the US TV firm Dish by the FCC could help kick-start the
market for solutions to space debris.
There are an estimated 500,000 pieces of space junk as small as a centimeter
across orbiting Earth, and about 23,000 trackable objects bigger than 10
centimeters. Dead rockets make up an interesting—and dangerous—category. The
956 known rocket bodies in space account for just 4% of trackable objects but
nearly a third of the total mass. The biggest empty rockets, mostly discarded
by Russia in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, weigh up to nine tons—as much as an
elephant."
Via
Fix the News:
<
https://fixthenews.com/good-news-human-rights-greece-education-burundi-reforestation-america/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
