Humans filled waterways, landfills, and streets with trash, so it’s no surprise the same thing happened in Earth’s orbital neighborhood. Now our species will finally take a crack at cleaning up.
Some missions focus on dead satellites, aiming to catch them with robotic arms, spear them with harpoons, or slow them with sails or tethers. Others aim for smaller pieces with lasers or stick to them with adhesive. It’s all an effort to keeping low-Earth orbit, the region up to 1,200 miles from the surface, usable. “Keeping all this litter in space, it’s like litter on the floor,” said Jason Forshaw a research fellow at the University of Surrey. “It’s becoming more of a risk.”
“It’s becoming more of a risk.”
The next few missions are RemoveDebris from Britain, on which Forshaw is one of the lead scientists; Japan’s just-launched Kounoutori 6 satellite, carrying the Kounotori Integrated Tether Experiment; and e.Deorbit from the ESA. Even the private sector is getting into the act: Japanese startup Astroscale is designing a debris-removal satellite. RemoveDebris is planned for 2017, while Astroscale plans to launch in 2018. e.Deorbit’s flight is scheduled for 2023 or 2024.
Low-Earth orbit is certainly crowded. There are currently about 780 satellites in the region as of mid-2016, with more planned all the time, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. The satellites share the area with about 500,000 pieces of junk a half inch across and larger, according to NASA estimates. Paint chips, pieces of blown-up satellites, spent rocket stages — it’s all there. Since everything moves at thousands of miles an hour, a paperclip can smack into a satellite with more energy than a heavy machine gun round. In April, a micrometer-sized piece of debris put a half-inch pit in an ISS window, even though the station orbits well below the majority of the junk.