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DEOS
One of the applications we've been looking at on the project is the problem of orbital debris and how they might be cleaned up. One suggestion, apparently, is to put up a big wall of that forensic jelly stuff they fire bullets into in CSI - then all the debris would hit it and get stuck. Of course, then the problem would be the large wall of flying jelly with bits of broken satellite stuck to it!
Anyway the Germans are building a satellite with a grasping arm. They plan to launch this and test it's ability to grab hold of objects that aren't "co-operating" (i.e. aren't also working to some predefined docking sequence). As far as I can tell the mission objectives consist entirely of going up into orbit, grabbing stuff and then letting go of it again. They haven't any plans to do anything useful with anything they grab, they just want to see if they can. This project is called DEOS (Deutsche Orbitale Servicing Mission). They have some interesting problems to solve, for instance, in space, if you reach forwards with your arm then your body is likely to move backwards!
My preferred solution to the orbital debris is to arm a satellite with a laser and give it some kind of utility function. So it autonomously decides whether something is useless and shoots it if it is. As I keep asking what could possibly go wrong with that? Sadly the most obvious thing that could go wrong is that you'd just end up with lots of very small debris floating around, rather than big bits of debris, so it doesn't solve the problem at all.
Anyway the Germans are building a satellite with a grasping arm. They plan to launch this and test it's ability to grab hold of objects that aren't "co-operating" (i.e. aren't also working to some predefined docking sequence). As far as I can tell the mission objectives consist entirely of going up into orbit, grabbing stuff and then letting go of it again. They haven't any plans to do anything useful with anything they grab, they just want to see if they can. This project is called DEOS (Deutsche Orbitale Servicing Mission). They have some interesting problems to solve, for instance, in space, if you reach forwards with your arm then your body is likely to move backwards!
My preferred solution to the orbital debris is to arm a satellite with a laser and give it some kind of utility function. So it autonomously decides whether something is useless and shoots it if it is. As I keep asking what could possibly go wrong with that? Sadly the most obvious thing that could go wrong is that you'd just end up with lots of very small debris floating around, rather than big bits of debris, so it doesn't solve the problem at all.