CLEANING UP SPACE GARBAGE:
The Japanese may have a solution for some of the orbital space debris or ‘space junk’. According to JAXA, a small micro satellite will latch onto a piece of space junk then move to a lower orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.
No word yet whether the United States is interested in this system or will create its own.
Lunar Greenhouse
Astronauts’ meals have come a long way from the freeze-dried powders and semi-liquid pastes of decades ago: now US scientists want to grow vegetables in mini-greenhouses on the Moon.
Although space fare has steadily improved over time, a team of scientists says the best is yet to come.
They look forward to when residents of future lunar or even Martian outposts can dine on luxuries such as fresh vegetables.
Even factoring in a recent satellite collision, a threat analysis found that the crew of space shuttle Atlantis will not face a dramatically higher risk of catastrophic damage due to space debris when it travels to the Hubble Space Telescope in May, according to NASA.
The overall risk of impact damage is higher for a mission to Hubble, which is 350 miles from Earth, than it is for a flight to the International Space Station, which orbits at a lower, less debris-choked altitude. However, the actual numbers are better than flight planners initially expected, a NASA official said Thursday.
“It’s not going to keep us on the ground,” Steve Stich, manager of the orbiter project office at the Johnson Space Center, told CBS News. “Obviously, we know we’re accepting a little higher risk for this flight. That’s why we’ve tracked it very carefully.”
Including the threat posed by debris from a satellite collision in February between a defunct Russian Cosmos satellite and an Iridium telephone relay station, the mean odds of a catastrophic impact during the Hubble mission are on the order of 1 in 221, which is below the 1-in-200 threshold that requires an executive-level decision by NASA’s leadership.
Darmstadt (Germany), Feb 017 (DPA) The European Space Agency (ESA) said Monday it hoped to set up its own detection system for space junk instead of relying on US radar to track the chunks of shattered satellites and spent rockets in earth orbit.
Last week a US satellite accidentally hit an out-of-commission Russian satellite, scattering a trail of debris in space.
Gaele Winters, who heads ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) at Darmstadt, Germany, said the debris would be a danger to ESA’ own satellites in the same orbit. He said ESA need live data so its spacecraft could steer clear of the junk.
Jean-Francois Kaufeler, head of the space junk monitoring department at ESOC, said, “Much more monitoring needs to be done.” Experts are to meet March 30 to April 2 in Darmstadt to swap ideas on how.
The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) tracks about 13,000 objects in orbit, but ESA estimates hundreds of thousands of distinct items are in orbit. A fragment 1 centimetre across could knock out a satellite if it hit it at speed.
Steering clear of space junk is possible, but requires precise tracking data in advance, the experts said.
