Chinese space scientists say they have successfully used a giant space sail to remove debris from Earth’s orbit.
Unveiled by the Shanghai Institute of Space Flight Technology on July 6, the gigantic sail launched and successfully pulled the Long March-2 rocket out of orbit.
The sail is made of an incredibly thin membrane, one-tenth the diameter of a human hair and measures about 270 square feet. When installed on the Long March 2 rocket, it increased the atmospheric drag acting on the rocket, accelerating the orbital collapse process and removing it from orbit faster.
The drag sail is deployed at the end of the spacecraft’s mission, gaining its decent speed and burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
This reduces the risk of colliding with active satellites or splitting into dangerous clouds. #space debris. pic.twitter.com/RtEefiBGcB— ESA Operations (@esaoperations) April 28, 2021
According to Interesting Engineering, the sail’s material is low-cost, flexible, and lightweight, so it’s easy to manufacture and launch, removing all forms of space debris from orbit.
Of the approximately 5,000 satellites orbiting the Earth, only about 2,000 are operational. That is, the rest are classified as space junk. Up to 27,000 small pieces of debris have also been tracked by NASA, clogging the orbital zone and moving at extremely high speeds of 15,700 miles per hour in low Earth orbit. The more things you put into orbit, the more likely they are to collide, thus creating a large amount of extra clumps of space debris. In 2009, a Russian spacecraft collided with the U.S. commercial spacecraft Iridium, adding 2,300 trackable large pieces and countless small pieces to an already congested orbit.
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Space junk can be deadly on future space missions. Small clumps of debris in the distance may not seem like much of a problem, but in March 2022, fragments from a fast-moving Chinese rocket slammed into the moon’s surface. Had it crashed into the International Space Station (ISS) instead, it could have been devastating. Since 1999, the ISS has had to make 25 maneuvers to avoid collisions with oncoming debris. Even if space junk collides with anything uninhabited by humans, the consequences could be dramatic as we rely on satellites for so many things, from communications and navigation to search and rescue to weather monitoring. there is.
When orbit collapses naturally, eventually everything in orbit around the Earth will eventually fall to the ground, but this can take a very long time, especially if you’re orbiting far away from the Earth. Space junk in high Earth orbit about 22,000 miles away could take hundreds or even thousands of years to return to Earth. This sail technology is intended to allow the orbital collapse process to be accelerated. That means we can remove debris from orbit faster, ensuring the safety of future spacecraft and astronauts.
