Abstract
Walking along a beach one may notice debris being washed ashore from the vast oceans. Then, turning your head up at night you even might noticed a shooting star or a bright spot passing by. Chances are, that you witnessed space debris, endangering future space flight in lower earth orbit. If it was possible to turn cm-sized debris into shooting stars the problem might be averted. Unfortunately, these fragments counting in the 100 thousands are not controllable. To possibly regain control we demonstrate how to exert forces on a free falling debris object from a distance by ablating material with a high energy ns-laser-system. Thrust effects did scale as expected from simulations and led to speed gains above 0.3 m/s per laser pulse in an evacuated micro-gravity environment.
Highlights
If we had to make a slogan for our work it might be: “Space is precious.” In our case of - outer - space this is a rather abstract statement
To ensure micro-gravity preparation of the target it was dropped from half a meter of height and, after approximately 150 ms of free fall, illuminated by an intense laser-pulse as displayed in Fig. 1 on the left
We will discuss our findings in the context of our most eminent question in mind: Is laser-based debris removal (LDR) based on laser ablation feasible? This question obviously implies several other questions, of greater technical detail
Summary
If we had to make a slogan for our work it might be: “Space is precious.” In our case of - outer - space this is a rather abstract statement. Statistical models point to the endangered regions in orbits between the edge of space at a few hundred kilometers up to roughly 1500 km above the Earth’s surface[8,9] This region hosts current human space flight, the Hubble space telescope[10], weather satellites, global communication satellites such as IRIDIUM2,11 or in the future, OneWeb and other constellations[12], as well as scientific satellite missions, helping us to understand, e.g, our ecosystem or the ongoing climate change[13]. If the debris problem will not be accounted for, extrapolations show that fragmentation will increase the debris amount far beyond our century even with no additional material launched[3] This could eventually lead to the loss of high quality weather forecast, navigation systems, earth observation, satellite TV, space science etc. Being at the edge of debris runaway effects, we chose to perform experiments reproducing a realistic situation as closely as possible in order to evaluate the usability of LDR
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