PRE2018 3 Group1

Group members

Name	Student ID
Max van Mulken	1006576
Mart Hagedoorn	1
Niels Verstappen	0999624
Rani van Hoof	1026024
Kees Voorintholt	1005136

Introduction

This wiki is an information page about a study on a huge problem that is known as the Kessler Syndrome. This Kessler Syndrome is basically a form of cascade failure. It starts with for example two sattelites colliding, this collision will cause a lot of debris to fly around in orbital space. This debris will then again collide with other debris, space stations or satellites, which can eventually lead to a shield of debris around the planet earth.

The importance of this problem will be further explained and several solutions will be considered and discussed.

The study is done for a TU Eindhoven course: Robots Everywhere (0LAUK0). While studying this problem and its possible solutions, it is made sure that the 3 USE aspects: User, Society and Enterprise, are central.

Problem definition

As mentioned in the introduction the problem that will be studied is the Kessler Syndrome. In the long term this shield of debris around the earth can have disastrous consequences. Starting with the consequence of not being able to send any new satellites into orbital space as they would get smashed by orbital debris immediately. At the speed of which these objects travel they will just shatter in tons of smaller objects and travel straight ahead. This means that now all these smaller pieces make a cloud of debris of which the total area is bigger than it was before it crashed. This cloud will destroy everything it encounters, only making the cloud of debris bigger and bigger.

But why would this affect the ordinary human being living his life on planet earth, the orbital debris is in space right why would we care? Well at the point where we have no more satellites in orbital space there will be quite some changes to our way of life. How would we make the important business call to a CEO on the other side of the world? How would we know what the weather will be for the coming weeks? All these things will become impossible without satellites.

Also it might seem like a future problem that we could maybe still prevent, however that is not true, in fact it has already started a long time ago. There are numerous reports of orbital debris colliding with satellites or space stations, the US government logged 308.984 close calls and 665 emergency alerts in 2017 alone [1]. Furthermore, on average a satellite crashes to the earth once every week which causes a rain of space junk that will burn up on the way to the earth. However some of this space junk may stay in orbit, which means the amount of orbital debris keeps increasing.

To have some kind of visualization of how much orbital debris is already out there, there are about 650.000 objects between the size of a softball and a fingernail. Next to that there exist approximately 170 million pieces of space junk that are smaller than the tip of a pencil [1]. All of this together with the roughly 23.000 satellites, rocket bodies and other human made objects, make a huge amount of objects flying around in orbit.

So if you had the impression that this problem was not very relevant, think again because it will change our ways of living drastically

[1] Mosher, D. (2018, april 15). The US government logged 308,984 potential space-junk collisions in 2017 — and the problem could get much worse. Retrieved february 7, 2019, from https://www.businessinsider.com/space-junk-collision-statistics-government-tracking-2017-2018-4?international=true&r=US&IR=T

Objectives

• Solution:

Stakeholders

While the problem described above is a very ambitious one to solve entirely, we believe the work we can do in 8 weeks is more than enough to impact multiple stakeholders. We will identify stakeholder groups and look at what our project can do for these groups. The users of this project are hard to define. Since the project aims to do research at the development of an autonomous robot which cleans up orbital debris, there are no real direct everyday users who will directly be influenced by the success of the project. However, long term effects will certainly have an impact on almost everyone were the Kessler Syndrome not to be stopped.

State of the Art

References and domain analysis

Approach

Planning

Item	Quantity	Price
Bread	0.3 kg	$0.65
Butter	0.125 kg	$1.25
Total		$1.90