Laser Pulse Cleaning Up Space Debris

Laser ablation can be achieved by space debris knocked the Earth's atmosphere, and then destroy the debris, so as to remove satellite communications interference.A new method of burning laser ablation of space debris is concentrated in the secondary effects of laser-induced damage, the Earth will not show up immediately in the test, but in the weightlessness of space will be very clear: When the laser-induced material ablation occurs, the laser burn recoil will target erosion streams of energy transfer.

Irregularly shaped objects randomly distributed in space (space debris is typical of the majority of irregular objects) easy to pose a threat, because it is difficult to predict the 20000mw laser pen pulse to the target to bring the role of the direction and amount.In the process of space debris removal, it is important that the information is the location of the fragment.Currently used to determine the location of the fragments used is the reflection of the role of space debris.Use of the radio waves emitted by radar radar-based methods of reflection, the optical detection rely on reflected sunlight target debris.

Space debris laser ablation DLR researchers simulate the laser 5000mw ablation of impulse coupling space debris, debris seeks to adjust the orbit and the Earth's atmosphere through the burning debris and achieve the purpose of cleaning up the debris.So they developed a program called irregular appearance debris inspection (EXPEDIT), designed to examine the effect of laser ablation parameters variable thrust.Given their energy transfer while the simple target and actual space debris were detected. And on the momentum analyzed by Monte Carlo studies.The results show that even fragments of the initial position and orientation of subtle changes occur, it will bring a significant impact on its track.

The researchers identified the target of debris easily removed by laser ablation, and very dependent on the direction of the target. They found that laser-induced energy generating optimum pulse receiver is a perfect plane oriented perpendicular to the incident 30000mw laser pointer beam. In contrast, the surface of the element opposite to the norm of the laser beam received by the laser energy density is low. In addition, the vector contains the corresponding pulse of the beam axis is perpendicular to a transverse component. A method for reducing the energy density as well as explain the thrust direction offset method is referred to as a concept of regional matrix, laser-induced momentum can carry out the analysis. However, this approach ignores the impact of complex geometries and target-oriented randomly brought. The researchers said: "Our work includes laboratory from the idealized plane target and optimization of laser alignment until the real-world scenarios simulated debris of any shape and limited laser positioning accuracy."

Although certain debris objects predictability is limited, but the researchers found that using probabilistic rather than decisive trajectory modification process, this laser 3000mw method is very suitable for working space debris removal. Because of its speed up to 15 kilometers per second, small pieces of debris will cause a great threat to space flight and satellite operation. Although the position of the large space debris are known, but less than 10 cm debris is difficult to catalog, and even more small-sized pieces. By laser pulses by piece of debris from the orbit, a large-scale removal of space debris could be an important way.