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A astronomy cast episode 672 Space debris removal. Welcome to astronomy cast for weekly

facts based journey through the cosmos. We help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know. My name is Fraser Kane. I'm the publisher of University Day with me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay. I seen your scientist for the planetary sciences institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey Pamela, how you doing? I am doing well. I just got home from a wonderful few days Dustin Gibson in Lourd. They taught me how to use some of the telescopes out there and I'm so cool. Shout out to them to actually bring in the clear sky.

I don't see those very often. So you had clear skies and you were around telescopes. Yes, yes. America heard pigs fly. I don't know the best. That right now. Winter continues here on the west coast of Canada. My wife shared a post on Facebook where it said this isn't winter anymore. This is harassment.

I've got a couple of inches of snow on the ground here in mid-March. That is deeply unusual, except for last year, which was also deeply unusual. But even this bill was gone last year. So this is just sick and wrong. I have fruit trees to grow. I've got things to plant. I need the weather to behave.

Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry.

We've talked about the rising problem of space junk. Okay, we know it's an issue. So what can be done about it?

Today, we'll talk about ideas to remove space junk, making sure that space is open to use for centuries to come.

So we've gone on and on, complaining, whining, wow, wow, space junk. There's too much debris up there. Castler syndrome. We'll never leave. We're trapped eternally. Okay, fine. What's somebody going to do about this?

How do we stop this?

It basically comes down to we need a giant space ball style vacuum cleaner to grab all of the junk and failing that people are going up with various versions of grappling on with arms to playing magnets.

And there's even like if you've ever played flag football where you pull the flag off of somebody and knock them out, well, we're looking to do more of the pin the tail and the donkey version of that. We're sticking flags onto bits of debris to give them extra drag. And there are so many ideas.

All right, we'll go through these ideas bit by bit, but but let's start with what I think is the best idea, which is don't produce space junk in the first place.

Yes, exactly. So how do we minimize? I guess what part of a spacecraft of a launch generates space junk?

It all depends, but we currently have as forms of space junk, the second and higher stages of rockets that instead of falling back to the atmosphere and self-destructing the atmosphere have instead decided in orbit, it's a good place to be.

Right. We have defunct satellites that are just hanging out, being dead and unsteerable. We have things that have fallen off on manner of mission been dropped by astronauts.

And then unfortunately, there's also the debris that either came from missions that self-destructed on deployment or were quite purposefully split apart by various nations testing their ability to do harm or things colliding.

And I guess one of the biggest is the is the spent boosters when you think about a rocket launching you have the first stage launching and then the second stage takes over and the second stage continues to fire its engines until it has put the spacecraft into essentially its final orbit.

But it is also in that final orbit. And so the payload and the booster then continue on and these boosters can be gigantic. I mean, there is biggest school buses and they're orbiting around the earth.

They occasionally get mistaken for miniature asteroids that we have caught in our orbit. And no, they're just boosters.

And then you've got and so the first stages they either land back on a barge or burn up in the atmosphere, the fairings will crash into the ocean.

Or be caught. Yeah, but that it's that second stage. Yeah. And you know, even potentially a third stage on say the Saturn five there are still out there. In many cases, as you say, they are they are orbiting the sun and are confused.

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