Just in case the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex surprises everybody and blows a chunk of its junk into orbit, a new idea provides a possible way to keep it from smacking the space station. Aim a fairly modest laser beam at it, and fire it long enough to just slightly alter the debris’s course  (and that’s just an opening joke, all you readers who may fear such a thing is possible. The laser idea is real).

A NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford U. team describes the idea in a paper submitted to the journal Advances in Space Research. It is circulating on the arXiv-physics preprint server. It holds that an affordable laser could over time impart a big enough momentum shift, via photons, to modest-sized orbital debris to steer it away from collisions calculated to otherwise be very likely and thus to add to the already stupid-bleak junkyard humankind is assembling in low Earth orbit.

This paper has been public for a week or so. Several news reports have resulted.

At Wired Science, for instance, Lisa Grossman has the essence in a pithy quote from one of the authors: “There’s not a lot of argument this is going to screw us if we don’t do something.” By some calculations, the authors tell her, a few such lasers in continuous operation might so blunt the formation rate of new debris that the threateningly growing density of orbital flotsam will shrink and eventually fade. That’d put paid to something the report and she and several journalists  describe – the dreaded Kessler syndrome.

Other stories:

• MIT Technology Review/Physics arXiv Blog: NASA Studies Laser for Removing Space Junk;
• Science News – Ron Cowen: Laser proposed to deflect space junk ;
• Daily Mail (UK) Daniel Bates: Nasa to shoot lasers at space junk around Earth to prevent collisions with satellites ; Oh well, it’s just the Mail, shooting itself in the hed with its laser mouth. Ignore the headline, the story has it much closer to right. This is no program, merely a speculative paper. The Mail has a nifty photograph of, ostensibly, some space junk that crashed to Australia’s red earth three years ago.
• PhysOrg.com – Deborah Braconnier: NASA proposes laser use to move space junk.

One wonders whether a bunch of such lasers, swiveling routinely to caress onrushing bits of LEO space debris and firing from locations without a lot of airliners and other potential innocent victims overhead, might speed reentry of small bits enough to distinctly increase decay rates of their orbits. Worth asking…

Grist for the Mill:

Paper “Orbital Debris-Debris Collision Avoidance” , NASA Orbital Debris Program Office ;

- Charlie Petit

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