Students wish to help with the space junk issue.

[Senties]

Hi there! My name is Leonard Welthagen, I am the principal of Sentrale Volkskool(Primary School) in South Africa. We have started with Enrich Education at our school and would like to know what we can do to help clean up this junk in space. Where do we start to do some research on this and and may we try to help you in this regard? I have a few bright kids that can not wait to start. Is there a program that we can download or buy in order to see this junk in space so that we can start with our research? Hope to be part of the solution and not he problem! Leonard.

[Vanamonde]

Hello Mr. Welthagen. Your offer has been moved to the science discussions sub-forum, where it will find a wider audience. Good luck with it.

[sal_vager]

I have not found a debris tracking resource yet, but there is this site which may be of interest to you and your students:

http://www.n2yo.com/

You can see where many satellites are currently and watch as they orbit the Earth

Edit:

Actually, the following may also be of use

http://www.spacejunk3d.com/spacejunk101-tracking.html

www.practicalpedal.com/photographcfo/NASA-Space-Debris-Tracking.html

Edited December 1, 2013 by sal_vager

[kiwi1960]

This means you will have to plan a field trip to space in order to clean up the junk...

Count me in.

[Ralathon]

This one tracks debris as it is scheduled to reenter:

http://www.satview.org/decay.php

Sadly, there isn't much you can do about it. To clear the debris you have to actually get to it first, and that involves things like rockets, which have a tendency to only worsen the problem.

Low Earth Orbit debris isn't much of a problem since it tends to reenter due to atmospheric drag fairly quickly. But defunct satellites in geostationary orbit won't decay for millions of years. So the only way to clean those is to go there and tow them into a reentry trajectory. Alternative methods to clean those high orbits sound like Science Fiction. One of the more reasonable methods I've heard was to make a bunch of giant lasers and point them at the debris, the laser would cause the satellite to slowly vaporize and this would produce enough thrust to slowly push the debris into a collision trajectory.