Looks my photo of Orion nebula! No but seriously, like 80% of the frames I took had satellite streaks. It’s becoming a rather difficult target to photograph, at least relative to my place on Earth. Sucks to see this likely to become true for Hubble too.
Is there any feesible plan for removing all the space junk? Has any authority that’s reliable put forth a plan that could actually work?
Europe, ESA, and a good amount of space actors have signed the zero debris charter that aims to increase the accuracy at which satellites are to deorbit when their activities have seized and to prevent space debris in a preventative approach.
ESA also has active plans to recover or extend space operations of satellites that needs servicing via its RISE-mission.
Finally, there are also the CAT and Clearspace-1 missions (amongst others?) which intend to actively remove satellites from orbit, or place them in the graveyard orbit.
Oh, and space lasers (spoiler Spoiler for monitoring space debris).
I guess there are more, but I think this already shows it is actively being developed.
Oh wow. I assumed the Hubble was like in a Lagrange point or something, not LEO
Hubble had 5 servicing missions from the Shuttle before it’s retirement. The Shuttle was only capable of LEO missions.
There’s research into the possibility of using something like Crew Dragon for additional maintenance missions to extend it’s service life even further.
It’s low enough orbit that a space shuttle mission went to repair it shortly after it was launched.
It was launched by Discovery and serviced by Shuttle missions five times. The last was in 2009.
For future missions they could probably detect a sat pass by an obvious bright dot moving in a straight line and then prevent that small area from being added to output photo. It would still be an issue for Hubble and a range of other older telescopes but some newer ones could receive a software update given the HW could handle the change.
If you detect it the image is already ruined. You need to predict where it’ll be.
So much space junk up there…eventually it will be impossible to leave earth without risking a hit from a screw travelling 50k miles per hour
I remember reading the world books for the Rifts RPG by Palladium.
A version of what you describe is why you can’t leave earth in a space ship easily
That’s not how Kessler Syndrome works.
Just like Wall-E.
Wasn’t Earth just over polluted so humanity had left?
And they eventually went back because they learned staying in space was a mistake.
ButbIndon’t remember the part about the orbits being so crowded or full of trash that you cannot grt on or off planet
Lol, wait until Elon and everyone else sets off the Kessler Syndrome. There won’t be shit up in the sky after that.
Starlink satellites are too low to pose that problem. They’re designed to deorbit in 5 years, anyway. Broken ones would probably do so even sooner
The real problem with those satellites is the immense amount of pollution that is released in the atmosphere due to them burning up. It could bring back our ozone hole problem.
What are they releasing when they burn up that would cause that much pollution?
It’s the burning aluminum that will be the problem if it turns out to be more than theoretical…
Luckily a lot of the cheap startup stuff is going to LEO, so the real junk that dies early or never makes contact should do the same.
Nono, there’ll be tons of shit, but not the usable kind.
