I’ve been wondering lately if you could use little puffs of gas fired from a satellite at very high velocity to impact smaller debris and take some kinetic energy from it.
It sounds ridiculous but v^2 scales quickly and if you can achieve anything close to the exhaust velocity from ion thrusters combined with retrograde orbit you can start knocking on the door of 100km/s impact velocity. That’s ~5J per microgram.
Obviously a tremendous number of challenges (puff coherency over great distances, accuracy over same, stationkeeping, etc) but interesting to me nonetheless.
It sounds ridiculous but v^2 scales quickly and if you can achieve anything close to the exhaust velocity from ion thrusters combined with retrograde orbit you can start knocking on the door of 100km/s impact velocity. That’s ~5J per microgram.
Obviously a tremendous number of challenges (puff coherency over great distances, accuracy over same, stationkeeping, etc) but interesting to me nonetheless.