James McEnanly writes: > What's really irritating is that it is not the > radiation that's a hazard. Its the shrapnel formed by > the liquid metal droplets.
Pursuant to my earlier proposal for fueling nuclear drives for long-range missions like Icepick by sending up hollow spheres with plutonium suspended in a shock-absorbing mesh inside: does anyone know of debris shielding concepts, current, or now in development, that make use of hardening foams? I've read about structural member experiments to go up on CubeSat. People are working on this kind of thing for other applications. My thought here is that you could send plutonium up in the above-described containers, whose containment value would be largely irrelevant once they passed a certain point (say, near the tipping point into the Moon's gravity well), since the chances of coming back to earth by deflection from debris would become increasingly remote. However, if something big were to smash up one of these containers, the plutonium might end up spiraling back down to earth without benefit of containment. (Magnetic fields possibly playing a role in that, but I'm hazy on this point.) But what if an outer layer of the shell was some material that started to foam (perhaps triggered by a certain amount of raw sunlight exposure), then harden again after significantly increasing the radius of the container? What if that foam were very good at decelerating incoming debris more smoothly? It might handle big debris shocks with much less chance of catastrophic damage to the container. Of course, by making the container bigger, it would also increase the probability of a significant debris strike - as the tether experiments showed, in LEO, large surface area + low integrity = significant erosion. But the surface area would grow sublinearly with volume increase, so maybe this isn't so bad. And if the foam material were, *in the long run* (say, 6 months to a year), highly photodegradable in space, material lost from it by impacts wouldn't contribute much at all to existing space junk. If anything, it might clean space up a bit (albeit negligibly.) Is there such magic material? -michael turner [EMAIL PROTECTED] > --- LARRY KLAES <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > And you know the anti-nuke forces will not bother to > > differentiate between some old Soviet satellites and > > the new JIMO. > > > > > > Science/Astronomy: > > > > * Havoc in the Heavens: Soviet-Era Satellite's Leaky > > Reactor's Lethal Legacy > > > > > http://www.space.com/news/mystery_monday_040329.html<http://www.space.com/ne ws/mystery_monday_040329.html> > > > > Old Soviet nuclear powered satellites leaked a trail > > of menacing radioactive droplets that have become a > > debris threat to other spacecraft. == You are subscribed to the Europa Icepick mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project information and list (un)subscribe info: http://klx.com/europa/
