This Robot Will Clean Up The Garbage We Left In Space

Our problem of garbage has expanded to space as well.

So far, in the low orbit of our Earth, around 2,000 km from the planet’s surface, around 3,000 satellites no longer in use and a larger number of millions of pieces are floating around. Another threat is that two or more pieces of space debris can crash and create smaller parts, which can damage spacecraft and satellites operating there.

The problem of space junks has become so severe that space agencies all over the world are working to find a solution. The latest measure is from ESA (European Space Agency) and what they proposed is robot hugs.

These robots are part of a mission called ClearSpace-1 and they are still at the experimental stage. What they will do is to launch four-armed robots to space to gather defunct satellites. Next, these debris pieces will be hugged firmly and then the two devices will once again enter the Earth’s atmosphere, finishing the suicide mission of destroying both.

This approach can only clean up a small number of pieces of debris at a time, which does not sound like much in comparison with the vast number of junks we have to deal with. However, the officials of the mission said that this was only the first step to open a whole new regime of space cleanup to protect not only our future spacecraft and satellites but also ourselves and the Earth’s atmosphere.

According to Luc Piguet, the CEO and founder of ClearSpace, the Swedish-based startup focusing on removing space junks that collaborate with ESA on this mission, we are having around 2000 functioning satellites in space and an even larger number of defunct ones, around 3,000. In the upcoming years, the number of waste pieces will increase rapidly as there are plans to lunch several mega-constellations consisting of hundreds or even thousands of satellites to the Earth’s orbit. This raises the need for creating a kind of space tow trucks to clean up existing junks and make room for new ones.

The robot hugs are scheduled to be sent to space in 2025 doing a test so that scientists of the ClearSpace-1 mission can see how effective its muscles work. The test subject is Vespa, a piece of debris of average size. This piece is left there by Vega, a launcher of ESA in 2013. Weighing around 100 kg and staying afloat around 800 km from the Earth's surface, it will be an easy target for the robot to grab on its first-ever mission.

Once it has captured Vespa, both devices will dive into our planet’s atmosphere to be burnt. This suicide mission is estimated to cost around $133 million.

For now, we may have to wait and see how effective this idea is in clearing up space. Other nations and space agencies have come up with their own proposals of how we can solve the problem of debris left in space. Some of them are using small nets or lasers mounted on satellites to push the garbage back to the atmosphere.

We may hear more about this mission and other ideas soon, as the problems are becoming more pressing as time goes by.