Giant lasers may soon be used to blast space debris

Researchers have proposed blasting the space debris out of orbit with a fiber optic laser, in order to combat the increasing amount of miscellaneous trash orbiting around the planet.

An international team of scientists have put forward a blueprint for a purely space-based system to solve the growing problem of space debris.

It combined a super-wide field-of-view telescope, developed by RIKEN's EUSO team, which would be used to detect objects, and a recently developed high-efficiency laser system, the CAN laser that was presented in Nature Photonics in 2013, that would be used to track space debris and remove it from orbit.

The EUSO telescope, which would be used to find debris, was originally planned to detect ultraviolet light emitted from air showers produced by ultra-high energy cosmic rays entering the atmosphere at night.

The second part of the experiment, the CAN laser, was originally developed to power particle accelerators. It consists of bundles of optical fibers that act in concert to efficiently produce powerful laser pulses. It achieves both high power and a high repetition rate.

The new method combining these two instruments will be capable of tracking down and deorbiting the most dangerous space debris, around the size of one centimeter. The intense laser beam focused on the debris will produce high-velocity plasma ablation, and the reaction force will reduce its orbital velocity, leading to its reentry into the earth's atmosphere.

The group plans to deploy a small proof-of-concept experiment on the ISS, with a small, 20-centimeter version of the EUSO telescope and a laser with 100 fibers.

The proposal is published in Acta Astronautica.