RESUMO
A conceptual study has been carried out on laser station networks to enhance Space Situational Awareness and contribute to collision avoidance in the low Earth orbit by high-precision laser tracking of debris objects and momentum transfer via photon pressure from ground-based high-power lasers. Depending on the network size, geographical distribution of stations, orbit parameters, and remaining time to conjunction, multipass irradiation enhances the efficiency of photon momentum coupling by 1-2 orders of magnitude and has the potential to eventually yield a promisingly significant reduction of the collision rate in low Earth orbit.
RESUMO
Walking along a beach one may notice debris being washed ashore from the vast oceans. Then, turning your head up at night you even might noticed a shooting star or a bright spot passing by. Chances are, that you witnessed space debris, endangering future space flight in lower earth orbit. If it was possible to turn cm-sized debris into shooting stars the problem might be averted. Unfortunately, these fragments counting in the 100 thousands are not controllable. To possibly regain control we demonstrate how to exert forces on a free falling debris object from a distance by ablating material with a high energy ns-laser-system. Thrust effects did scale as expected from simulations and led to speed gains above 0.3 m/s per laser pulse in an evacuated micro-gravity environment.
