Can we deorbit space trash into the sun by splitting it in two?
So there's an issue of deorbiting stuff because if you just deorbit it a little, it'll enter a more elliptical orbit but still hit you in the back when you return to this place a year later.
1. Size and issues with space trash. I do not think about satellites right now, more of a "when we start sending things to various places, maybe start to spread out more, we're going to generate lots of trash. That trash might be in a form of satellites, wrecked ships, used up propulsion modules, damaged nuclear reactors etc... now with the last one we can't just burn them up in the atmosphere due to the toxicity and radioactivity of said elements. Once we get to a large enough amounts of trash,
2. We deorbit the trash into the sun. 989
How? We launch it into an escape velocity from the earths orbit into the suns orbit. Doesnt matter if it's elliptical. But it will come back eventually to the same place unless we use a LOT of fuel which makes it not-really-feasible.
3. Solution to the problem We build a contraption that is basically a nuke with trash on both sides of it in a mass proportion of 3:1. We explode the nuke **away from the earth, in a solar orbit, not earth orbit) and make the smaller part fall into the sun, and the bigger part escape the solar system. This way we use the trash as a kind of a "projectile thruster".
Earth goes around the sun at 29.78km/s and to escape into deep space we only need 42.1 km/s.
I assume we won't need to slow down to 0 to fall into the sun, but will calculate that way anyway, and that the chunk to be exploded via the nuke is bisected not-neccessarily-in-half.
We could make something escape the solar system by adding 12.3km/s to one part, and slowing the other chunk down by 29.78km/s to zero. that would make the junk chunk bisected in a 3/1 ratio, with a nuke in the middle to impart those forces on the space trash.
Could just do a kind of a directional nuke. Also, any trash that gets scattered and so on we dont care about because it's up-down and sun-ward and space-ward.
Is that something that potentially could be done or am I missing something here? 912