Space pollution & Precautions To Control

1. Space pollution & Precautions To Control Karan Kaushik DronacharyaShikshaNiketan Sr. Sec. School, Bhiwani,Haryana.

2. Space pollution, can be describe as waste man made objects in space , which are in no longer use for any purpose. Adding more to this Space pollution comprises of satellites which are no longer working today but can be use in near future by making small efforts includes adding fuel or adding some technical changes. Furthermore objects contain rocket stages, defunct satellite, small particle made from explosions and small particle of rock in space, which usually weighing less than a gram are also cause Space pollution. These pollution is mainly from spent rocket stages, old satellites, fragments from disintegration, erosion and collisions. Nowadays the Space pollution across the globe has become a painful concern for environmental scientists.

3. Asteroids, meteoroids and space junk causes Space pollution • Asteroids or planetoids are small Solar System bodies and dwarf planets especially those of the inner Solar System. Sometime they come to earth atmosphere and due to friction with atmospheric gases. • Meteoroid is a small rocky or metallic body travelling through space range in size from small grains to 1 meter-wide objects. Most are fragments from comets or asteroids, while others are collision impact debris ejected from bodies such as the Moon or Mars. Latest activity was recorded on Feb 15, 2013 named as Chelyabinsk. • Space Junk orbital debris, the technical term for nonfunctional and human-made space junk, includes not only whole, abandoned satellites, but also pieces of broken satellites, deployed rocket bodies, human waste, and other random objects.

4. According to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, there are currently over 100 decommissioned satellites in geosynchronous orbit around the earth. Depending on their condition, these spacecraft could contain perfectly usable parts worth a total of as much as US$300 billion - that's a lot of good junk sitting up there. DARPA is particularly interested in retrieving antennas, as these are expensive to make, heavy to put into space, and should still be in good condition. But due to lack of effort they are creating Space pollution now.

5. Types of space junk : • Defunct spacecraft: such as satellites that are no more useful. • Spent rocket bodies: used to launch satellites into orbit. • Objects released during missions: such as waste vented from the Space Shuttle. • Small fragments: caused by collisions, explosions or deterioration of active satellites or larger pieces of Space pollution.

6. History • Space pollution was first observed in 1946, during the Giacobinid meteor shower, Helmut Landsberg collected several small magnetic particles that apparently are unintentionally associated with the shower.Fred Whipple was intrigued by this and wrote a paper that demonstrated that particles of this size were too small to maintain their velocity when they encountered the upper atmosphere. Instead, they quickly decelerated and then fell to Earth unmelted. • Now Space pollution falls to earth mostly every day. Lottie Williams was hit hard on the shoulder by a piece of the Delta II rocket that weighed the same as a drink can in Oklahoma in 1997. She was unharmed. In 1979 burned pieces of Skylab were predicted to land in South Africa. Two defund satellites of space junk was fall back to earth on Canada but no one was hard.

7. Present Scenerio: • As per information available on The UCS Satellite Database is a listing of the more than 1000 operational satellites currently in orbit around Earth. Adding more to this there are almost 1700 unused satellite are revolving around earth. • Furthermore there are near about 19,000 pieces of debris larger than 5 cm are tracked, with another 300,000 pieces smaller than 1 cm below 2000 km altitude.

8. Current Practices: • After detecting Space pollution first time in world a major modification in space crafts is done with its boosters due to which boosters does not remain in space. • Recently a policy was made by many organizations under which one up/one down policy is used that is if a new satellite has to be launched then a old satellite has to be moved down, this not only reduces Space pollution but also prevents collisions between satellites.

9. A well studied solution is to use a remotely controlled vehicle which will capture the space junk and move it to a central station. Sling sat is performing this method. Instead of using rockets, an electrodynamic technology can be attached to the spacecraft on launch. At the end of its lifetime it is rolled out and slows down the spacecraft.Although tethers of up to 30 km have been successfully deployed in orbit the technology . It has been proposed that booster stages include a sail-like attachment to the same end.

10. Precaution to control space pollution; Galactic Garbage Truck: Picture space as an ocean. Then picture EDDE (Electrodynamics Space pollution Eliminator) as the trawling net. Once EDDE’s 200 nets scoop up the space garbage, each piece could be flung back to Earth.

11. Long Live Lasers: Compared to other high-priced solutions, James Mason’s cosmic cleanse is cheap: only a million bucks. Mason, a NASA research associate, wants to zap individual pieces of junk with a laser anchored to Earth. The idea is to slow the trash so the individual pieces de-orbit. Think Duck Hunt meets Laser Tag. “It's kind-of like air traffic control for near earth orbit,”

12. Other methods The Golden Balloon: Last year , a private California-based engineering firm, announced the Gossamer Orbit Lowering Device, or GOLD. Using a large, ultra-thin balloon that dramatically increases the aerodynamic drag of the satellite, GOLD allow the dead satellite to enter the Earth's atmosphere quickly and burn up. Very similar to Cubesail, in fact. GAC reports that if their device were used by all satellites under U.S. regulations, the number of space-junk-on-space-junk collisions would decrease 40 percent by 2025. Celestial Dodgeball—A big wide ball made of aerogel would be shot into space to act as a Space pollution collector. The friction generated from the impact would send the trash hurtling back to Earth. Sounds cool, right? It is, save for one teensy-tiny problem: the locked-into-a-fixed-orbit ball can’t pick its targets. Drag and Drop: The newest solution to Space pollution, CubeSails, was designed . In a nutshell: a 5X5 meter, remote-controlled, parachute-like device uses air resistance to drag defunct satellites to a fiery reentry much sooner than expected. Test-trials will commence later this year.

13. Monitoring Space pollution. • Scientists see through Radar and optical telescopes regularly and track over 10000 "man- made" objects in space, 8500 of those objects are - spent satellites, launcher stages and fragments. Only a small nearly (5%) of the track able objects are useful spacecraft. • Space pollution is also known as space junk or space waste. Space junk got its start in the middle of the twentieth century; at the very beginning of the space race. The problem of space pollution is not that bad yet but now they are growing in number. • “The current space environment is growing increasingly hazardous to spacecraft and astronauts,” said Donald Kessler (American astrophysicist and former NASA scientist). • More than 200 experts scientists from 18 countries took part in the Second European Conference on Space Space pollution, which was organised by the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany, on 17/19 March 1997. (ESA, European space agency)

14. Size and force of space junk. • Junk in LEO (Low earth orbit) with a size larger than 10cm can be tracked from Earth. In GEO (Geosynchronous Earth Orbit), the lower size limit for tracking the Space pollution is around 1m. • Junk from 1 to 10cm is known as the “lethal population” because it is large enough to destroy a satellite but too small to be tracked. • Junk smaller than 1cm is usually not large enough to destroy a satellite.

15. Thank you The amount of Space pollution can be reduced easily if many countries launch a single rocket from which many satellites can be launched, like the collaboration between USA and UK. Amount of weather satellites can be reduced if a single satellite will inspect the weather of many countries. Adding more to this nowadays when spacecraft send into the space it should be design in such a creative manner so that while moving into the orbit it should collect junk comes into his way. Many other useful idea can be suggest by creative minds but the implementation of those ideas is very important. Furthermore united nation makes availability of funds beyond any conflict to the scientist for reducing the Space pollution.