The future of Space is now upon us as the fledgling space industry gets started. But are humans being smart about what is out there? You see, we have one hell of a lot of Space Junk floating around out there and it is moving very fast as it orbits the Planet.
We must design Space Junk Collectors, which can clean up this mess and protect our space tourists, space workers and astronauts from potentially fatal accidents from space debris. A few ideas have been floated around in an online think tank to redesign system such as a Whipple Shield to use in the collection of space debris.
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If we had a Space collection unit and abstractly lets envision a giant robo vacuum like a Romba Robo-vac by iRobot Corporation in space then we could collect each piece of space debris. Of course there is a lot of space out there in volume and distance to travel between space debris pieces. So we may need to use a US Navy AUV search and destroy underwater sea mines scenario to do it right and that would mean many such units working together in a 3D Space Grid sequence pattern. These space robotic vacuums would need to be launched together and split off to their independent but reciprocal or parallel orbits together it seems?
A program could be designed with fuzzy borders of area operations in each grid, with a master program with artificial intelligence decision matrix software for the robotic-space-vacuum teams, this way they self assign which pieces to pick up in the most efficient pattern and also steer around satellites or equipment orbiting if that potential eventuality ever becomes necessary. This could be run autonomously trusting the devices to work as a team or by taking instructions from a ground control telemetry computer and feeding exact tiny burn times and corrections back to each unit net-centrically. The collision avoidance systems will be the exact opposite of the collection rendezvous interception software program to collect space debris.
During the collection each robotic space vacuum with indeed fly a somewhat zig-zag pattern like a Bat does when it eats 1000 bugs per hour, very efficient, lining up space debris in advance with the most direct path and working together as a team. Remember that it is best to stay on course with little deviations and trajectory changes to conserve fuel, while still accomplishing the job of cleaning up the collection grid area.
Each piece of space debris will need to be removed from the Whipple Shield collector and a robotic arm would put it into a canister behind the vacuum. Abstractly this is the vacuum bag on a household vacuum cleaner. Since there are various sizes of space junk and not all that is collected is needed and some is not metallic or rather magnetic in nature and thus not all can be collected using magnetic attraction alone. We should consider this in 2006.
"Lance Winslow" - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/