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["Wendy" <crazygardens AT verizon.net>]

Tethers in space are cool.  Nasa and others have been doing research on 
these for quite some time.  While at Langely, I served as lead analog 
technician for the SEDS/DeltaII experiments.  The purpose of our SEDS 
experiments was to model the behavior of tethers in space for use with a 
number of projects that required acurate modeling of tether behavior.  There 
are quite a number of papers published on our works, but here is a site that 
gives a nice brief overview of the SEDS experiments. 
http://space.skyrocket.de/index_frame.htm?http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/seds.htm

The Italian government has, what I think, the most interesting tethers 
projects.  They are interested in tethers to generate power by using the 
Earth's magnetic field as the primary of a transformer and a conductive 
tether as the secondary.  I'm not sure how many experiments they have tried 
to date, but when I was following it, they kept frying their equipment. 
Which in this case was almost a good thing.  It turns out that the amount of 
power that can be harvested in the manner far exceeds what anyone imagined, 
so they kept upping the capabilities and they still kept frying their 
hardware.  If more research were aimed toward this method of power 
generation, I am sure that the power needs of the world could be easily met. 
Google tether space Italian

BTW, if the young people's tether came up short because of a timing issue, 
they just didn't do their homework of made a math error.  Tether behavior is 
now well documented.

Wendy


Bev, your recent post on how to rid Earth of nuclear waste piqued my
interest so I read the Wikipedia article about space ladders.

This popped up today:

Tetherball Space Capsule Launched, But Gets Short String
By John Borland EmailSeptember 25, 2007 | 2:57:26 PMCategories: Space

Yes2_large31As student projects go, the YES2, or Young Engineers
Satellite 2 currently drifting Earthwards, is about as cool as they get.

As we wrote earlier, the student-run experiment is testing a new kind
of deployment technique on the Russian-launched Foton-M3 mission,
trying to see whether a payload can be reeled out on a long line and
released into orbit, instead of using expensive rockets and attitude
adjusters.

The students’ critical moment came today, and so far it’s a qualified
success. The payload, a small capsule dubbed “Fotino” was intended to
be let out on a 18.6 mile, fishing line-thin tether before being
released. But the process went more slowly than projected, and the
little test capsule was cut loose by a preprogrammed command after
just 5.2 miles.

European Space Agency scientists are currently tracking the little
device to figure out where and how its parachute will bring it back
to earth.

The mishaps may mean that the students’ tether system won’t find its
way immediately into adoption for critical satellite or other
launches. But the test gives space programs around the world new data
on an innovative and potentially money-saving technique for orbital
deployments.

    "We are very proud of the students' work, although we didn’t
reach the full 30 km deployment," said Roger Walker, YES2 project
manager for ESA’s Education Office. "The hard work of theYES2 team
over the past five years has paid off with this largely successful
demonstration."

Unfortunately, no pictures yet of the actual deployment. But ESA has
a nifty animation on its site of what should have happened. Pictured
above is the Fotino capsule before launch.

Full article at:

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/09/tetherball-spac.html
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