ESA's new proposal to eliminate space debris.
In previous publications I have touched on the topic of Elon Musk's program or project to create a million space satellites that serve as artificial intelligence servers, launching them from the Moon to avoid the issue of pollution, but even so they are still a million space satellites that are also going to multiply because other companies and other countries will also want to have their constellation of space satellites similar to the one that Musk wants to put up.
The question is what to do then with space debris, because there is a lot of space, but not so much in low Earth orbit, which is where most space satellites are currently, so how is it done? How is space debris removed? Or how satellites that are out of use and that can be a problem for other space satellites are eliminated, at the European Space Agency ESA they are developing the OMLET program.
It would be using a laser to push space debris, although it sounds very spectacular to use a laser, do not think that it is going to destroy the satellite or the debris.
space, but what they are going to do is push them and not by much, they could push it up or down, but a matter of meters, enough to group the space debris, which would be the intention rather than knocking it down, which would be more complicated.
The problem of space debris is Kessler syndrome, a syndrome developed in the 1970s by Donald J. Kessler, a NASA astrophysicist, in which it was basically a cascade effect. If too many disused satellites accumulated, too much space debris, in the end we could find that a fragment of space debris ends up impacting a satellite, destroying it, and that destroyed satellite becomes a cloud of space debris fragments that end up impacting other satellites. destroying them, creating more space debris and thus cascading until the entire low Earth orbit was full of debris, destroying all satellites, all ships and all space stations and making it impossible to have a satellite in orbit.
It would be the apocalypse of the satellite era and it would also be a tremendous complication for space exploration because we would have to go through that area of “garbage minefield bullets”. This method being developed by the European Space Agency aims to group rather than demolish, using laser strikes.
It is not to destroy the disused satellite or space debris with the laser, but to push them little by little to place them in orbits or in safe areas, you can push up or down, but trying to shoot down, some could be used as a weapon to shoot down an enemy satellite, it would be a fairly useless weapon because the pushes are quite subtle, it would take months hitting them with the laser to be able to shoot down one satellite at a time, so it would not be a very good tactic in terms of destroying satellites, in fact, the tendency current military is not to destroy satellites in orbit, because it would be catastrophic, it would start Kessler syndrome.
The current trend in terms of military defense against enemy satellites is to capture them, to create ships that can trap the enemy satellite in orbit and throw it into the Earth's atmosphere so that it disintegrates or if it is possible to capture the enemy satellite and bring it whole to Earth, with which you would have the technology of the enemy power, that is what the military is currently doing.
The problem is complicated because the issue of space debris is who pays, who pays for the removal of space debris, large disused satellites have an owner and that owner should eliminate that space debris, but the authorities or the UN or whoever at an international level, if one day an authority is created, can demand from governments or companies that you have to pay for the removal of that satellite, when the satellites have an owner, but what happens to the fragments or the waste or the little pieces that are left floating around and there are hundreds of them? of thousands? Who do you demand to pay it? The topic is very complicated
and that is a problem that is going to increase.
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