Swiss space agency looks to address debris concerns

Friday, 17 February 2012 09:36

With humans sending an ever-increasing number of satellites and other craft into orbit around the plant, the amount of junk that comes along with it has grown as well. Now Space Daily reports that a Swiss project hopes to begin cleaning up the mess that has been made just outside of Earth's upper atmosphere.

Developed by the Swiss Space Centre, a part of the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Lausanne, or EPFL, the project looks to make use of a specially-designed "janitor satellite."

The satellite, known as CleanSpace One, will initially be tasked with cleaning up the debris from the two older Swiss satellites that are scheduled to be phased out before the completion of the project. But CleanSpace One is as much a test of the concept of the janitor satellite as it is specifically designed to bring down those two pieces of detritus.

The issue with space junk is that these materials are traveling in orbit, endlessly accelerating around the planet, reaching speeds of nearly 28,000 kilometers per hour, or nearly 17,400 miles per hour. At that speed, even comparatively small pieces of debris can prove dangerous, to other satellites, to any prospective attempts at space flight and to the International Space Station that is already in orbit.

What's more, any collision between space debris can lead to a dramatic increase in the number of pieces in orbit. While each piece poses a smaller risk, the dispersion of these pieces means a greater chance of a collision with debris down the line, any of which can prove damaging, costly and potentially fatal for those few at risk.

This makes the task of CleanSpace One a particularly sensitive one. While numerous ideas for dealing with debris have been tossed out for consideration, the Swiss satellite takes the straightforward approach of latching onto the decommissioned satellite manually and guiding it down into the atmosphere. While this may sound simple, the janitor satellite obviously must move into position alongside the older satellite while moving at the same incredible speed.

Each of the CleanSpace satellites comes in at a hefty 10 million Swiss francs, or nearly $11 million, but the project is not purely altruistic.

"Space agencies are increasingly finding it necessary to take into consideration and prepare for the elimination of the stuff they're sending into space. We want to be the pioneers in this area," explained Volker Gass, director of the Swiss Space Center. "We want to offer and sell a whole family of ready-made systems, designed as sustainably as possible, that are able to de-orbit several different kinds of satellites."

While such a business venture might have seemed implausible in decades past, the dramatic rise in global telecommunications, right alongside the growth in space debris, has created a strong market for a cost-effective strategy for addressing the problem.

The Associated Press reports that the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration is actively tracking more 500,000 pieces of debris around the Earth. Several events over the past two decades have dramatically increased this count, including collisions involving French, American and Russian satellites as well as the intentional destruction of a Chinese satellite in a test of that country's weapons technology. The latter event is estimated to have created more than 150,000 pieces of debris by itself.

The costs of these incidents can be massive, with the 2009 collision between Russian and American satellites running as much as $20 billion. As the amount of debris in the space increases, costs to insure satellites are likely to increase as well, giving companies a strong financial incentive to address the issue, despite the "tragedy of the commons" nature of the problem.