The European Space Agency (ESA) signed a 86 million euro contract with Swiss start-up clearspace to build a special satellite, clearspace-1, which will be launched in 2025 to capture a piece of space waste weighing about 100 kg. This will be the world's first mission to capture and dispose of orbital space debris.

At that time, "clean space-1" will use four fully armed space claws to capture the debris, drag it to a lower orbit, enter the atmosphere together and burn it. The satellite's follow-up mission also includes "capturing more challenging objects and capturing multiple space debris simultaneously.".

Since the beginning of the space age in the 1960s, countries have launched 5500 launches, leaving 23000 objects larger than grapefruit in orbit, and millions of small objects that cannot be traced. ESA estimates that today there are more than 100 million space junk, which is spinning around the earth at a speed of 40000 km / h.

"Even objects a few millimeters in size can cause tremendous damage to other spacecraft because of their high speed," said Luc pigate, CEO of clean space In the next few years, there will be "hundreds or even thousands of satellites" operating in low earth orbit, and the risk of collision will only increase.

Louisa Innocenti, head of ESA's clean space office, said the challenge for the clean space-1 mission is to design an imaging system that automatically and quickly depicts an object's characteristics before the space claw can grasp it.

Of course, clean space is not satisfied with this goal either. Pigate said: "we will move forward steadily, hoping to capture larger targets and deal with multiple targets at the same time to reduce costs."

"It's necessary to cut costs," says Hughes Lewis of the University of Southampton He explained that clean space would cost 100 million euros (86 million of which came from ESA) to clean up about 100 kilograms of space waste. In this way, the cost of cleaning up the "most dangerous object in orbit", the 8000 kg ENVISAT earth observation satellite, would be "staggering".

In addition, Japan's astroscale company plans to launch a mission called elsa-d in March 2021: release a target aircraft with a ferromagnetic docking plate with a service spacecraft and capture the target with magnets.

Source: Science and Technology Daily