The video is stunning: A satellite in orbit fires a net to snare a nearby target in the pioneering demonstration of space-junk-cleanup technology.
Okay, if you’ve got some spare time, check out this amazing website called Stuff in Space. It’s a simulation of every satellite (alive or dead), space station, and large piece of space junk orbiting the Earth right now.
The first experiment designed to demonstrate active space-debris removal in orbit has just reached the International Space Station aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.
For a few months in the fall of 1957, citizens of Earth could look up and see the first artificial star. It shone as bright as Spica, but moved across the sky at a much faster clip. Lots of people thought they were seeing Sputnik—Russia’s antennaed, spherical satellite, and the first thing humans had flung into orbit. But it wasn’t: It was the body of the rocket that bore Sputnik to space—and Earth’s first piece of space junk.
The growing popularity of small satellites as well as the upcoming deployment of low-Earth orbit mega-constellations will likely greatly increase the amount of space junk as well as the frequency of catastrophic collisions, a study led by the United Kingdom’s University of Southampton suggests.
An experimental Japanese mission to clear ‘space junk’ or rubbish from the Earth’s orbit has ended in failure, officials said Monday, in an embarassment for Tokyo.
Russia’s state-run corporation Roscosmos develops a project of a space cleaner – a satellite that will be able to “blow away” space junk.
The mass of “space junk” orbiting the Earth poses a serious threat to future exploration, a British scientist said on Friday at the launch of a project to raise awareness of the issue.
RemoveDebris operation will test a range of devices, including nets and harpoons, designed to sweep up litter orbiting Earth
