Rockets armed with talcum powder could stop deadly space junk

Space junk

An illustration of space junk in orbit (not to scale)

ESA

Cloud-emitting rockets could prevent satellites from colliding by altering their trajectories, avoiding potential disasters that would see Earth’s orbits littered with space junk.

There are 2000 active satellites in orbit today, along with 3000 dead satellites and thousands of pieces of dangerous smaller debris. Often satellites must dodge out of the way of this debris – or other satellites – but defunct satellites lack the ability to move.

Darren McKnight at US technology firm Centauri and his colleagues think they have a solution: using suborbital sounding rockets to launch a …

source: newscientist.com