The federal space program, designed in Russia until 2025, provides for the creation of a satellite for cleaning up space debris, RIA Novosti reports.
“The Russian Federal Space Program includes the creation in the coming years of a garbage collector from geostationary orbits. In addition, the rules for cleaning up space debris with the active participation of Russia are being discussed by the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space,” said cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, having joined in environmental seminar of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation via video link from the ISS. According to the cosmonaut, in order to carry out operations to approach objects, capture them and remove them from orbit, it is necessary to adopt international agreements that will establish procedures for information exchange and regulations for conducting such operations.
Shkaplerov noted that there are almost 10 thousand tons of space debris in near-Earth orbits. This is a dangerous factor for spacecraft. Last year alone, the Russian automated warning system for dangerous situations in near-Earth space recorded 220 dangerous approaches to the ISS.
Omsk State Technical University is creating a special satellite that will be able to remove large space debris from altitudes of the most used orbits up to 2,000 km. According to the idea, the device will either push waste to a height of more than 3-5 thousand km from the Earth, or move it lower so that it burns in the atmosphere.
The size of objects that the designed apparatus can handle will be up to 2-3 m in diameter and up to 5 m in height. To capture space debris, the satellite will be equipped with a robotic arm. The developers are also thinking about using a network – this option is already being developed by Japanese specialists for some military drones.
Also, a new space debris monitoring system was developed and patented by specialists from the Russian Space Systems (RSS) holding company. The online publication AstroNews reports on a new method for accounting for artificial objects in low-Earth orbit. The system is designed to solve one of the most pressing problems of detecting and accounting for expired artificial Earth satellites, various space objects and their fragments located in Earth orbit.
Observation of space debris will be carried out by ground-based optical telescopes.
To improve the quality of the obtained data and filter noise, the new technique proposes to use the photon counting method, which is currently used when recording weak signals. Photo-counting detection (optical encoding of images and computational decoding to obtain new images of higher quality), as well as digital adaptive-correlation processing of the received information, is also expected.