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China Says Work Under Way to Mitigate Space Junk

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posted on Nov, 16 2008 @ 05:36 PM
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The Chinese government is implementing a wide series of measures to reduce the amount of debris left in orbit by Chinese rockets and satellites, and to develop a space-surveillance tool to determine what is in orbit, Chinese space-debris experts said.

The measures, some of which already have been put into place, include techniques already adopted by some other space powers to reorbit retired satellites out of the geostationary orbital arc and to render Chinese rocket upper stages passive in orbit by emptying their fuel tanks to prevent the threat of explosion and debris propagation.

The Chinese government has been a member of the 11-member Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) since the mid-1990s. But Chinese officials concede they have been slow in adopting debris-prevention or debris-mitigation measures.

China's seriousness about space debris has been thrown into question since the January test of a mobile ground-based Chinese missile that was used to intentionally destroy a retired Chinese meteorological satellite, creating thousands of pieces of orbital debris in a heavily used region of low Earth orbit.

The negative global reaction to that event led China to cancel a scheduled April IADC meeting in Bejing. The meeting was switched to July in Toulouse, France. China sent a full delegation to the meeting, which featured at least one blunt exchange between U.S. and Chinese delegates regarding January's test of the anti-satellite missile.

Li Ming, who headed the Chinese delegation to IADC, declined to outline China's space-debris policy immediately after the Toulouse meeting. But in response to Space News inquiries, in August he emailed a summary of China's space-debris policies in reports written by him and by other Chinese space-debris experts.

"China has made a relatively late start in space debris research," Li said in a preface to the summary of the debris research. "There is still an obvious gap between China and other advanced countries in space debris-related technologies."

China's space-debris research is based at the Purple Mountain Astronomical Observatory, a Chinese Academy of Sciences facility located in Nanjing and home to the Center for Space Debris Observation and Research.

Li said the center and related institutes, working under China's 11th Five-Year Plan from 2006-2010, are working on four debris-related aspects:

Space debris surveillance.
Collision avoidance.
Satellite debris protection.
Debris mitigation.
Two optical telescopes, one a 25-inch (65-centimeter) fixed facility and the other a 10-inch (25-centimeter) car-mounted telescope, have been developed as space-surveillance tools and have been used to time the launch of China's astronaut-carrying capsules to avoid heavier concentrations of debris in low-Earth orbit, Li said.

A Hypervelocity Impact Center created by Harbin Institute of Technology has been created and tasked with developing technologies to shield spacecraft from debris.

Debris mitigation has been the focus of much IADC work to persuade space powers to take measures to reduce the debris-creating potential of their rocket upper stages and their satellites.

Li and Zhang Wenxiang, a research fellow at the Xi'an Satellite Control Center, said Chinese Long March rockets-specifically the Long March (LM) 2C, LM 2D, LM 3, LM 4B and LM 4C vehicles-either already have been fitted with propellant-venting systems or soon will be.



Full article can be read here: www.space.com...



posted on Nov, 16 2008 @ 05:39 PM
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It's nice that China is getting on the stick but this should probably be in the Space Exploration forum.



posted on Nov, 16 2008 @ 06:06 PM
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This probably belongs in the Space forum. These are part of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and their various Outer Space programs.

Unless of course you can actually link this to UFO's but no one has yet to my knowledge.



 
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