Werner looks into the matter of space traffic and find a challenging bureaucratic transition that would need to happen fast to make the biggest difference. A new US radar is taking shape on a spit of land in the Pacific Ocean. This radar and companions at 12 other sites will send a harmless curtain of radio frequencies into space. Each time a satellite or chunk of debris passes through the curtain, some of the radio energy will be reflected back to the ground. The Space Fence will spot debris or satellites as small as a golf ball, a considerable improvement over today's softball-sized limit. That's good, because miniature satellites are all the rage, and even a tiny object traveling 29,000 kph (nine times faster than the average rifle bullet) can destroy a spacecraft. Here's the bad news. A team of experts somewhere will have to track 10 times as many objects as before and apply algorithms to estimate when or if any of these previously undetectable objects will collide with each other or spacecraft.
THE HANDOFF
Aerospace America ; 54 , 10
2016
Article (Journal)
English
NTRS
|Automotive engineering | 1993
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