Australian scientists want to clean up space junk by shooting it with lasers

A team of Australian scientists is teaming up with NASA on a project that will use lasers to not only find and track space junk, but also destroy these orbiting hazards.

There's a lot of junk orbiting around our planet. Rockets and booster stages from satellite and spacecraft launches, dead satellites, garbage bags, cameras, tools, and even a toothbrush — these objects all travel around Earth at thousands of kilometres per hour. Added to that are all the tiny pieces of debris — nuts, bolts and fragments of damaged spacecraft and satellites, that largely go unaccounted for because they're just too small to track.

"Without efforts to clean up the space junk, it could eventually become impossible to send satellites into space," Professor Matthew Colless, the director of Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Mount Stromlo Observatory, said in a statement.

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It's not just that it's getting crowded up there. It's also that the more we put up there, the greater chance there is of a collision. The movie Gravity showed this quite graphically, as an expanding cloud of debris from a weapon test shredded the space shuttle and Hubble telescope, then took out every low-Earth-orbiting satellite, the International Space Station and China's Tiangong space station as well. This was an exaggeration of the Kessler Effect, as it wouldn't happen that quickly in real life, but the problem has already started.

The solution to the problem, according to Prof. Colless and the Mount Stromlo-led project group, is to use ground-based lasers — first to find and track the debris, but eventually to zap it all so that it burns up. However, this isn't about blasting high-powered lasers into low-Earth orbit, turning it into a shooting gallery. That would just make things worse. The concept here is to first use lasers to help telescopes see better through the atmosphere (which is already used at several telescopes around the world). Once astronomers can better see the debris, focusing a more powerful laser onto these bits of junk will exert radiation pressure on them. That will slow them down and cause them to fall into the atmosphere, where they'll burn up harmlessly.

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"There are hundreds of thousands of pieces of space junk in orbit that are big enough to do serious damage to a satellite or space station," Colless said in the statement.

"Everywhere humans have been in space, we leave some trash behind. We now want to clean up space to avoid the growing risks of collisions and to make sure we don’t have the kind of event portrayed in Gravity."

The Cooperative Research Centre will involve Australian National University and RMIT University, Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, NASA's Ames Research Center, telescope designer and manufacturer EOS Space Systems, aerospace company Lockheed Martin, and Australian telecommunications company Optus. With a total investment of around $90 million, Colliss told Reuters that the project should be up and running in about 10 years.

(Image courtesy: Wikipedia)

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