Video courtesy of the European Space AgencyĪ longer-term solution to space debris is to reduce the number of used appliances in orbit by pulling them back into the earth’s atmosphere, where they normally burn up. The number of space-debris fragments around earth has grown from relatively few in 1961 to hundreds of thousands in 2013. ‘Such an approach guarantees that the net is well-suited to the target and even if any element of it should break-off during capturing, it would remain inside the net,’ said Dr Umberto Battista, coordinator of the EU-funded ADR1EN project. They’re testing it in zero gravity conditions made famous by the astronaut-training ‘vomit comet’, where a plane flies in a parabolic ascending and descending flight path. If it all goes according to plan, a full-size mission to capture real space debris could launch within the next ten years.Īnother group of researchers is using computer simulations and an atmosphere-bound plane to refine designs for a net system, which they hope to commercialise in 2017. ‘Both capture technologies were originally conceived for satellites over 1 000 kilogrammes.’ ‘The net and harpoon concepts have been scaled down for this mission,’ said Dr Jason Forshaw, the Surrey Space Centre's project manager. 'It will be Europe’s first operational active debris-removal mission' Professor Guglielmo Aglietti, Director, Surrey Space Centreĭoes this mean that the new systems will only work for small pieces of debris? Far from it. The CubeSats will be launched from a larger satellite platform and re-captured as a demonstration of the net’s ability to capture real space debris. They’ll test the technology out on toaster-sized CubeSats that can be built using off-the-shelf components. The net’s wide firing angle and weighted tips will make debris easier to capture, and the harpoon includes a locking mechanism to prevent loss of contact after initial capture. ‘It will be Europe’s first operational active debris-removal mission and one of the world’s first missions to demonstrate such technologies in the native space environment,’ said Professor Guglielmo Aglietti, Director of the Surrey Space Centre, who coordinates the EU-funded REMOVEDEBRIS project.Īirbus, a partner on the project, will build the net-and-harpoon system. Due to the high orbital speeds involved, a collision with even the smallest of these fragments could be potentially catastrophic.Ī space mission planned for late 2016 will be testing out nets, harpoons and drag sails in an attempt to prove technology that could one day scour low-earth orbit, mopping up fragments of space junk. This so-called Kessler effect could in theory happen if a space debris collision sets off a chain reaction, with the resulting debris cloud making an entire orbital path unsafe for many years.Īlmost 60 years of rocket launches, explosions and collisions have left 300 000 pieces of space junk larger than a EUR 1 coin in low-earth orbit, of which only 19 000 are actively tracked.
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