Professor Guglielmo Aglietti-Surrey Space Center-Thousands of Tons of Space Debris in Orbit Pose a Threat to New Satellites, What's the Solution

Finding Genius Podcast

Richard Jacobs

Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.4 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2018

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Over the past several decades, advancements in space technology have led to an unprecedented number of satellites being put into orbit, which has led to a number of exciting new insights and findings. However, it's come at a cost: with a few thousand tons of space debris from old and nonfunctional satellites orbiting the earth at a rate of about seven kilometers per second, each individual piece of debris poses the threat of colliding with another, or with a new satellite. This is a problem that must be addressed in order to continue using satellites safely.

Professor Guglielmo is the director of the Surrey Space Center at the University of Surrey in England, and he joins the podcast today to discuss this problem and the ways in which he's trying to solve it. He explains that when large particles of debris collide with one another, a cascade effect of collisions ensues, worsening the problem. And of course, if a large piece of debris were to collide with a new satellite, the satellite would be destroyed. According to Guglielmo, then, the largest threat is none other than the largest pieces of debris.

Tune in for all the details about the work that's being done at Surrey to develop a solution, and the biggest challenge facing the development of that solution. Learn more at www.surrey.ac.uk/surrey-space-centre.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Almost Here, Around the Corner of Future Technology Podcasts with Richard Jacobs.
0:07.0	Future Technologies is poised to transform our lives for better or worse for the focus of this podcast.
0:13.0	Almost here means these technologies are now here
0:16.0	and starting to be used.
0:18.0	Or just around the corner,
0:19.0	for Bitcoin to artificial intelligence,
0:21.0	3D printing, blockchain, virtual reality, and more.
0:25.0	Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Future Tech Podcast.
0:30.0	The guest is Professor Gugreimo Agrietti. He's the director of the Curry State Center at the University of Hurry in England.
0:38.0	So Professor Guglielmo, how you doing?
0:41.0	Hello, very well, thank you, yourself.
0:43.0	Yeah, good.
0:45.0	And no one can say that our topic is in definitely future type-based because it looks like you're working with
0:51.0	testing their house spacecrafts and clean up face debris.
0:55.0	Can you tell a little bit more about your research?
0:57.0	Oh, well, this is, we believe, an important topic because in the past decades, a lot of satellites have been put in orbit, some of them stopped
1:06.8	working, plus there is, you know, all there's debris orbiting there, for example, stuff released from the mirror space station
1:18.9	in the old days and so on.
1:20.9	So there is a need to try to clean up maybe a big some of this debris in order to be able to
1:29.5	continue to operate with me satellite safely.
1:33.0	What kind of debris is in space like whole satellites or just
1:38.0	fragment to metal with plastic or what kind of sir?
	...

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