Japan Startup Eyes Fusion Laser To Shoot Down Space Junk From Ground (nikkei.com) 48
Japanese startup EX-Fusion plans to eliminate small pieces of space junk with laser beams fired from the ground. Nikkei Asia reports: EX-Fusion stands apart in that it is taking the ground-based approach, with the startup tapping its arsenal of laser technology originally developed in pursuit of fusion power. In October, EX-Fusion signed a memorandum of understanding with EOS Space Systems, an Australian contractor that possesses technology used to detect space debris. EX-Fusion plans to place a high-powered laser inside an observatory operated by EOS Space outside of Canberra. The first phase will be to set up laser technology to track debris measuring less than 10 cm. Pieces of this size have typically been difficult to target from the ground using lasers.
For the second phase, EX-Fusion and EOS Space will attempt to remove the space debris by boosting the power of the laser beams fired from the surface. The idea is to fire the laser intermittently against the debris from the opposing direction of its travel in order to slow it down. With a decreased orbiting speed, the debris will enter the Earth's atmosphere to burn up. High-powered lasers are often associated with weapons that blast objects into smithereens. Indeed, the EOS Space group supplies laser weapon systems used to destroy drones. But lasers designed to remove space debris are completely different from weapon-grade lasers, EOS Space's executive vice president James Bennett said during a visit to Japan in November.
Current laser weaponry often uses fiber lasers, which are capable of cutting and welding metal and can destroy targets like drones through heat created from continuous firing. Capturing and removing space junk instead involves diode-pumped solid-state (DPSS) lasers, which are pulsed to apply force to fast moving debris, stopping it like a brake. EX-Fusion's signature laser fusion process also involves DPSS lasers, which strike the surface of a hydrogen fuel pellet just millimeters in diameter, compressing it to trigger a fusion reaction. This makes space debris removal a useful test along the path to commercializing the fusion technology.
For the second phase, EX-Fusion and EOS Space will attempt to remove the space debris by boosting the power of the laser beams fired from the surface. The idea is to fire the laser intermittently against the debris from the opposing direction of its travel in order to slow it down. With a decreased orbiting speed, the debris will enter the Earth's atmosphere to burn up. High-powered lasers are often associated with weapons that blast objects into smithereens. Indeed, the EOS Space group supplies laser weapon systems used to destroy drones. But lasers designed to remove space debris are completely different from weapon-grade lasers, EOS Space's executive vice president James Bennett said during a visit to Japan in November.
Current laser weaponry often uses fiber lasers, which are capable of cutting and welding metal and can destroy targets like drones through heat created from continuous firing. Capturing and removing space junk instead involves diode-pumped solid-state (DPSS) lasers, which are pulsed to apply force to fast moving debris, stopping it like a brake. EX-Fusion's signature laser fusion process also involves DPSS lasers, which strike the surface of a hydrogen fuel pellet just millimeters in diameter, compressing it to trigger a fusion reaction. This makes space debris removal a useful test along the path to commercializing the fusion technology.
great - but.... (Score:3)
don't get me wrong - if they can do it, I think its worthy...
but how can you make people care to clean up their shit?
surely its not free.......
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Well, it could be part of the insurance for satellites, or simply a requirement for anyone who's put junk out there under threat of heavy fines that will quickly make it cheaper to just deorbit the junk, etc.
Re:great - but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a great cover story for an anti-ballistic missile program.
A laser that can hit a 10-cm object at orbital speed would have no problem hitting a much bigger incoming missile at sub-orbital speed.
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It's a great cover story for an anti-ballistic missile program.
A laser that can hit a 10-cm object at orbital speed would have no problem hitting a much bigger incoming missile at sub-orbital speed.
And a pulsed laser that can ablate enough material to slow down an object enough to deorbit it would also do a fine job of damaging a missile even if the continuous power was lower than other anti missile laser systems that rely on continuous power.
Its the same with space based power stations, they can beam form their microwave phased array emitter to target and disable or functionally destroy other satellites far before any useful amount of power could be beamed back to earth.
Re:great - but.... (Score:4, Informative)
"A laser that can hit a 10-cm object at orbital speed would have no problem hitting a much bigger incoming missile at sub-orbital speed."
If the target is in orbit then you can take many orbits to identify it and determine the trajectory to arbitrary precision.
If the target is sub-orbital then by definition you have less than one orbit to even determine that it exists.
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If the target is in orbit then you can take many orbits to identify it and determine the trajectory to arbitrary precision.
You can make more than one reading per orbit. In fact, you can make many readings per second.
Three readings are enough to plot the trajectory, although more are better.
That's how counter-battery radar works.
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What next, are you going to tell me that the cold war space race was mostly for the development of ballistic missiles?
Re:great - but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a great cover story for an anti-ballistic missile program.
A laser that can hit a 10-cm object at orbital speed would have no problem hitting a much bigger incoming missile at sub-orbital speed.
Why would you need a giant conspiracy and a "cover story" for ABM weapons when Western-aligned nations... including Japan... have been openly developing ABM weapons for decades? Everyone involved has been pretty open about the aims.
Sometimes a fancy garbage disposal laser is just a fancy garbage disposal laser.
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Because it is an arms race. So when Reagan said "Hey USSR we negated your whole nuclear deterrent with lasers (lol jk)" they built more missiles and decoys and went bankrupt. But we don't want them to know for real if we can shoot down 10x their arsenal or 1/10th their arsenal.
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It's like how Japan's scientific satellite launcher is a perfect cover/advertisment for probably the most advanced, if oversized ICBM.
It's a solid fuel launcher able to put satellites into SSO (or even heliocentric) orbit, with a crew of 8, a short preparation time and a mobile launch control. You know for just those times when you need to put a solar observation satellite RIGHT THE FUCK NOW after a long period of storage.
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I'd imagine that a number of space agencies would pay. It can get quite expensive tracking all the junk and plotting routes that avoid it. If you can manipulate the orbits even a bit, over time you could make their work a lot easier.
Imagine if the ISS regularly has to dodge one of the tool bags that the astronauts have lost over the years. You pay this company some sum of money to slow the bag down, it drops below the range where it threatens the ISS, and due to lower mass, not getting boosted regularly,
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A company in the US was recently fined for not being able to de-orbit its satellite. Such fines could pay for clean-up. Companies would probably take insurance to cover them.
We might need a fund, paid into by companies that put up new satellites, to help cover the cost of de-orbiting junk.
This is hardly uncharted territory. We did both those things for other types of pollution.
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I'd assume that once the laser hits, the energy that does not go into the junk will get scattered in effectively all other directions. Maybe don't shoot at actual mirrors, but other than that ...
What could possibly go wrong (Score:3)
1. This is SDI "Star Wars" meets Spies Like Us meets Real Genius... but will need a laser far more powerful and expensive to run that even LLNL.
2. How are they going to identify, track, and deorbit both really small shit and really big shit flying overhead way out there at Mach 20? Each one of those steps would be an incredible engineering challenge.
3. This "startup" is a circle wank of "Idea guys" without thinking things through.
Re:What could possibly go wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Well, definitely an engineering challenge, but I don't see why they can't do it.
1. Why would they need a laser more powerful than the LLNL? I assume you're referring to "lawrence livermore national laboratory" and their 2.2MJ fusion ignition laser system. Honestly, this would be drastic overkill, I think. We need to shift the orbit a bit, not vaporize the debris.
1a. If we decide we need a much less powerful laser, it would follow that it could also be cheaper, right?
2a Identify: Ask NASA and similar organizations?
2b. Track: Again, NASA and similar are already tracking them.
2c. Deorbit: The idea is relatively simple. Ever heard of a "solar sail"? Or seen a Crookes radiometer? One of those little flag things in a vacuum that will spin when you shine a light on them. When the object is approaching the facility, hit it with a laser to slow it down. This lowers the height of orbit at the opposite side of the orbit. Get that low enough, atmospheric resistance increases and the orbit decays faster.
As for aiming, well, it doesn't actually have to be that difficult. The object will radiate much more when you're on target, so you can use that to fine tune your aim once you're close.
3. Doesn't seem to be. It passes the sniff test to me. We're playing around with laser uplinks with the ISS, Starlink, and more. The difference here would be twofold: First, the link wouldn't be bidirectional, the object can't give correctional data other than luminence information. But that may be enough. Second would be power level: Obviously, a comm laser would be a lot less powerful than this.
Some things you might not realize is that we already track stuff in orbit quite closely, so no need to duplicate effort, and the required power level isn't actually that high, since you can provide the push over many orbits if you have to. Hell, you could have a priority list, and just work on whatever's highest on the list and in a suitable part of the orbit.
As part of that, it doesn't really matter that it's around mach 20. You just need to reduce the speed "a bit". once you get it into the atmosphere, friction will take care of the rest. The lower the junk starts at, the cheaper, obviously. We could start with all the junk that's around 200-2k km up. Complicating matters, a lot of this stuff is likely in elliptical orbits, so there's definitely better times to decelerate them - it's better to make the low lower and the high lower, because drag increases rapidly at lower altitudes. Get it low enough, and friction will take care of the high part. Around 1k m/s should drop most of the debris low enough to fall out of orbit in a few years (IE fast enough). The faster/more specific a drop you can do, the better, of course. Just get one spot down that low, and friction will take care of the rest.
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1. Why would they need a laser more powerful than the LLNL? I assume you're referring to "lawrence livermore national laboratory" and their 2.2MJ fusion ignition laser system. Honestly, this would be drastic overkill, I think. We need to shift the orbit a bit, not vaporize the debris.
Perhaps it’s a bit overkill, but the reason it’s using a pulsed system instead of a continuous one is specifically to vaporize some of the object. The ablated material will change its momentum far far more than any light pressure and quite a bit more than trying to heat it slowly with a continuous beam and do the same. The reason you will need insane power is the range, the beam will be quite unfocused and wide at that point so of a 1MJ beam pulse on a 10cm diameter object you may only get 1kJ
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The idea would be that you fire the laser after it breaks the horizon, and probably cut it off around the time it reaches overhead. Any thrust "up" would be considered wasted, but not a big deal because energy earth-side is practically free compared to the cost in orbit.
That said, going by my KSP experience, thrusting straight away from the planet can have the effect of lowering your orbit elsewhere. It can make your orbit more elliptical. It's been a bit, I'd need to fire it up again to check.
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I looked up some papers on it, it seems that they consider a 100kW system to be sufficient, though they're looking at ~200 orbits of firing to drop most objects.
Bigger stuff might take 1000 or more.
But then, if we get really serious about this, we could install a dozen or so stations, so you can get multiple hits per orbit.
While the paper author figured that 1k orbits would be impractical, I'm not so sure.
Re:What could possibly go wrong Lawrence Livermore (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What could possibly go wrong Lawrence Livermore (Score:4, Funny)
and they had electrical atmospheric discharge issues.
Sounds like with a decent super capacitor bank you get your power for free! /s
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Don't get stuck in the past. Bet you could get 1.21 Gigawatts!
More Orbital Debris (Score:2)
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To address your point 2: radar.
There are dozens of radar stations on the planet dedicated to exactly this task.
Or do you think anyone in our time is launching anything without knowing if there is some debris in the path, or not?
It wasn't junk until... (Score:1)
Warning (Score:4, Funny)
Don't eye fusion laser with remaining eye.
Uh-oh (Score:2)
I initially read that that Japan was going to laser-shoot down junk food.
A bit like my teachers used to at school.
You can fuck with Americans with nuclear threats, ignore international trade agreements, spy openly, form oil cartels, shout “death to America” with a crowd of a millions people. Whatever. They don’t bend.
But this one would mean WW III the same second.
lasers a threat to our avian friends (Score:3)
As head of the International Federation of Spotted Owls and Bald Eagles, I protest the unrestricted use of high power lasers this way. Wind farm power is bad enough.
I have written to Superman and Wonder Woman and asked them to clean up the space debris instead.
Now I must go, the nurse came in with a tray of pills.
The big bonus is... (Score:2)
It also works on not-junk.
It is better... (Score:2)
Not having considered this in their plans makes me quite suspicious about the whole project.
Laser Light Difraction (Score:2)
Narrow beams spread faster than a wide beam due to light diffraction issues. Therefore you need to use something like a telescope to ensure that all the power arrives within whatever diameter spot that you are shining into orbit.
Last time I checked Mount Fuji was an active volcano, not a great place for a telescope.
Mount Stromlo is a little higher than Canberra (768m).
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Nah, they'll just mount it on giant humanoid piloted vehicles.
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C'mon, man, this is Slashdot. The laser has to be mounted on a shark!
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Yeah, but it's Japan. Land of the Rising Gundam.
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Well, okay... but be sure not to tell the Agriculture Ministry [bbc.co.uk].
And for target practice (Score:2)
You might want to aim for those pesky drones delivering small package over Texas. Aslong as they're not *your* packages of well I don't know mystic cream of Sam Yung Guy
How about a laser that ... (Score:1)
... shoots russian drones out of the sky?
Not the only problem (Score:2)
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Spreading tiny metal particles in the upper atmosphere might be another problem to be solved.
But if we can produce enough of it to increase the Earh's albedo a little, this may actually solve a much bigger problem.
Lasers are not tractor beams (Score:3)
Re: Lasers are not tractor beams (Score:2)
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It's not vaporizing the junk. It's ablating a small amount of material on the leading edge. This slows it down enough for it to eventually deorbit. So yes, the laser is used to "bring down" space junk.
possible? (Score:2)
Can this actually work? Atmospheric wiggling is going to make it awful hard to aim.
Re: (Score:2)
Sodium laser guidestars and adaptive optics took care of that problem a quarter century ago. The problem is that the company proposing this is a scam that's just out to fleece gullible investors.
Flying junk (Score:2)
AI targeting system was instructed to eliminate. It promptly began shooting down 737 MAXs.
Vaporware (Score:3)
This is a scam. It's not a real thing and will not result in an operational device. The key to understanding this fact is remembering that exactly one group have ever used lasers to induce inertial confinement fusion and it's not these guys. This is yet another press-release-as-story "written" by an over-worked and under-informed freelancer that was actually written by the PR team for a company that is, and I can't stress this enough, a scam to part VC suckers from their money.