Ships abandoned at sea are finders keepers, space junk, not so much. Japan’s space agency JAXA is planning on deploying an electromagnetic tether next month to test its potential to remove space debris from orbit. The tether is designed to change its orbit by using an electrical current flowing through the wires. The current creates an electromagnetic field that attracts the debris and pushes the net away from Earth’s geomagnetic field. Once the net has grabbed enough space debris it will be commanded to slow down and de-orbit, allowing the space debris, spacecraft and net to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. ............Foremost among the legal issues is the ownership of the fragments that the JAXA mission will theoretically gather. Article VIII of the Outer Space Treaty vests continued ownership of any object or components of an object in the state that launched it into outer space.2 This ownership would technically extend to fragments since they are “component parts” and would enjoy the same ownership rights as a fully intact satellite or other spacecraft. thespacereview/article/2441/1
Posted on: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 03:13:21 +0000
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