Australian bid to solve space junk problem
Pieces of space debris need to be urgently captured and destroyed to avoid potentially devasting damage to satellites, a major conference has heard. With the mooted solutions being slow and costly, an Australian company backed by NASA is developing an innovative solution to the growing threat of collisions in the Earth's atmosphere.
Source: AM | Duration: 4min 35sec
ELIZABETH JACKSON: There are so many objects orbiting the Earth that it's just a matter of time before there is a cascade of collisions between satellites and space junk, with the potential of devastating repercussions for communications and security.
That's the warning from a major conference into space debris which took place in Europe this week.
Scientists estimate there are nearly 30,000 objects larger than a fist orbiting the Earth, and tens of thousands of smaller pieces.
The conference's final communiqucalled for urgent removal of large space junk, something that'll cost billions of dollars and is years away from being developed.
But as Madeleine Morris reports, an Australian company is pioneering technology which could solve the problem for a fraction of the cost.
ESA VIDEO VOICEOVER: Our activities in space have left traces behind. To date, there have been some 5,000 successful satellite launches and certain orbits are at risk of becoming congested.
MADELEINE MORRIS: If this video from the European Space Agency is making you nervous, it's supposed to.
The ESA wants getting rid of space junk to be a top priority for governments, militaries and the many commercial enterprises who need safe and reliable satellites to run their businesses and help us run our modern lives.
ESA VIDEO VOICEOVER: About five to 10 of these objects need to be actively removed every year.
This is the only way to fully stabilise the space debris population in space.
MADELEINE MORRIS: It's a huge and costly business. At this week's conference, a range of potential removal methods was displayed, from giant space nets and harpoons to ion thrusters.
The aim is to capture the junk then destroy it.
But an Australian company is pioneering another method of avoiding collisions in space.
EOS Space Systems is backed by NASA (National Aeronautical and Space Administration) and has been part funded by the Australian Government.
Within two to three years, it hopes its method of moving space debris by blasting high-energy lasers will be up and running.
Professor Craig Smith is EOS Space Systems' CEO:
CRAIG SMITH: So we've been developing tracking systems using lasers for some years, so we can actually track very small objects with a laser rangefinder to very high accuracy.
By ramping up the power, photons in the light beam have momentum and energy and we can transfer that momentum to the target. And if we put enough of those photons on the target, we can very slightly change the velocity.
If you allow that velocity to change over a period of perhaps 24 hours, then you can get actually a 100 metre shift in the location of an object to deflect it from colliding with another space debris object.
MADELEINE MORRIS: So in layman's terms, you're shooting lasers at space debris to move them out of harm's way?
CRAIG SMITH: That's the plan.
MADELEINE MORRIS: What this conference in Europe has called for is not nudging space debris out of the way but actually capturing it and removing it.
You're not developing any method to actually destroy the debris, are you?
CRAIG SMITH: The trouble is you can't really destroy it unless you can bring it down into the Earth's orbit and burn it up. If you have a bigger laser beam and cut things in half, all you do is create more debris.
The European concept is to go up there with a big satellite to capture a satellite, which is typical - when you have a company that builds satellites then any solution for the space debris involves building another satellite and launching it up there.
We're trying to be a little more subtle and cost-effective in what we do by using a laser from the ground just to stop collisions happening, rather than having to go up with a very, very expensive rendezvous mission.
MADELEINE MORRIS: You're not solving the problem though, are you - you're sort of shifting it around for another day.
CRAIG SMITH: Well, the trouble is that all the capture programs are many, many years off and billions of dollars in expense. If we can make the photon pressure nudging work, then you actually don't need to de-orbit stuff because you can actually stop the collisions from happening.
So it actually is a solution - it's just a different one from the one people have thought about.
MADELEINE MORRIS: And is this a huge user of energy to actually create a strong enough laser beam?
CRAIG SMITH: It's not a huge amount of energy. It's way less than you would put into the lights in a football stadium, for example. It's just very focused - in a football stadium, the light's going everywhere to illuminate everything. We only actually want to illuminate a one metre patch of the sky to a high intensity.
The key to it all is being able to track things very accurately in the first place, otherwise you can't possibly land a one-metre-wide laser beam on a target if you can't track it to better than a metre.
ELIZABETH JACKSON: That's Craig Smith, the CEO of EOS Space Systems; Madeleine Morris with that report.