Shoot down space debris with a fibre optic laser
▻http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=151785&CultureCode=en
In 2013 NASA estimated there are more than 500.000 pieces of space debris in orbit around the earth. This can cause serious damage to satellites and other space vehicles; e.g. in 1996, a French satellite was hit and damaged by debris from a French rocket that had exploded a decade earlier. (cf. also the film “Gravity”)
Toshikazu Ebisuzaki, Chief Scientist of the Computational Asrophysics Laboratory at the Riken Research Institute proposed a method to eliminate roughly 3.000 tons of debris through a CAN laser mounted onto the ISS. (the Coherent Amplification Network bundles 10.000 fibre optic lasers).
First the debris is tracked with the existing infrared EUSO telescope (Extreme Universe Space Observatory) :
Next the laser shoot the objects until they are knocked out of their orbit and destroyed during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere:
The new method combining these two instruments will be capable of tracking down and de-orbiting the most dangerous space debris, around the size of one centimetre. The intense laser beam focused on the debris will produce high-velocity plasma ablation, and the reaction force will reduce its orbital velocity, leading to its reentry into the earth’s atmosphere.
A full-scale version of their system would be armed with a 100,000-watt ultraviolet CAN laser that can fire 10,000 pulses per second, each lasting one-tenth of one-billionth of a second. The researchers say this system could blast debris from a range of about 60 miles (100 kilometers), and the laser would need about 17 lbs. (8 kilograms) of lithium-ion batteries.
▻http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Toshikazu_Ebisuzaki
His research paper:
▻http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Toshikazu_Ebisuzaki/publication/273912262_Demonstration_designs_for_the_remediation_of_space_debris_from_the_International_Space_Station/links/552ce16f0cf2e089a3acfe70.pdf
▻http://www.docdroid.net/z4wa/space-debris-iss-hirosawa-wako.pdf.html (backup link)
▻http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debris.html
EUSO — ▻http://www.rssd.esa.int/index.php?project=EUSO&page=index
CAN laser article in Nature Photonics — ▻http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v7/n11/pdf/nphoton.2013.292.pdf
Kessler Syndrome : existing debris colliding with one another generates more debris, which would also collide with one another, creating even more junk. — ▻http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-debris/kessler-syndrome
