Mini Satellites Used as 'Space Cops' to Clear Debris

A team of U.S. scientists plans on using mini satellites as 'space cops' to clear debris around satellites.

Space debris can damage functional satellites, which is why a team of scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are trying to control the traffic in space using mini satellites.

Researchers used a series of six images from ground based satellite taken over a period of 60 hours to show that it is possible to refine the orbit of another satellite in low Earth orbit.

"Eventually our satellite will be orbiting and making the same sort of observations to help prevent satellite-on-satellite and satellite-on-debris collisions in space," said Lance Simms, lead author of a paper said in a statement.

The Space-Based Telescope for Actionable Refinement of Ephemeris (STARE) mission, an ongoing LLNL project, includes a constellation of nano-satellites in low earth orbit. It aims to refine orbits of satellite and space debris to less than 100 meters.

The scientists also used a ground based satellite to refine the orbit of a satellite NORAD 27006.  The scientists also predicted the trajectory to within 50 meters over the next 36 hours. 

The tools that they used to image and track the orbit of NORAD 27006 are the same that will be used in the future STARE mission.

"This leads credence to the capability of STARE to accomplish its mission objectives," LLNL project lead Wim de Vries said in a statement.

Accurately predicting the location of the satellite in low earth orbit is challenging. Such uncertainty leads to several errors. To avoid these errors, SSN must continuously observe set of 20,000 objects it tracks. But, the positional uncertainty of an object is about 1 kilometer meaning that it can trigger as many as 10,000 false alarms per expected collision.

The main aim of the STARE mission is to drop the 1 kilometer uncertainty to 100 meters or less , which which will in turn drop the number of false alarms.

The finding was documented in the journal Small Satellites.