They also mention valuable efforts at international cooperation and improved spacecraft design to dramatically reduce the rate of increase of debris. Pulse energy is 30kJ. The system is installed at a high altitude, low-latitude site with good seeing to minimize the difficulty of attaining this goal. The laser pulse intensity on the debris object is adjusted so that a photoablation jet is created. Since most irregularly-shaped debris objects were created by explosion or collision, they will be tumbling about 3 axes, and this tumbling combined with operation near the photoablation threshold intensity will produce a net thrust averaged over many laser shots which is approximately parallel to the laser propagation vector. For many of the objects, this can be done in one pass.
Safe region is below solid lines indicating nonlinear process thresholds in the atmosphere.
4.4 Pulsed laser energy and pulsewidth are determined Figure 2. Cost and agility set limits to the mirror diameter which can be used, and, hence, to beam diameter in the atmosphere. Given a wave-length, these effects together determine combinations of pulse energy and duration which satisfy both limits. That solutions exist is shown by Fig. 2. This choice then fixes maximum system slant range z, once l and D b are picked.