Fishing for space junk

The problem:

Just a single centimeter-sized screw could hit a spacecraft with the impact of a hand grenade.

Space junk travels at speeds up to 17,500 mph – this velocity means just a teeny tiny piece of junk, like a fleck of paint, could damage a spacecraft or satellite.

Abandoned spacecraft, launch vehicle stages, and mission debris are just a few of the sources of junk large and small.

Some of the stuff up there is several tons and, clearly, a collision would have serious results. Some debris, such as batteries and leftover fuel, could also be explosive as a result of solar heating.

One collision could even produce a chain reaction of further collisions.

For example, a defunct Russian satellite collided with and destroyed a U.S. Iridium commercial satellite in 2009. This collision added more than 2,000 pieces of trackable debris to the space junk problem.

In another example, when China deployed a missile to destroy a satellite in 2007, an additional 3,000 pieces of debris was added to space.

The Solution:

Fishing. Recent tests for space age ‘space nets’ by the European Space Agency have proved very successful.

While fishing nets have been in use for several thousand years, space nets take this this ancient piece of technology to a whole new level.

The hope is that nets could be deployed to capture and remove space threats. The ESA announced that its cutting-edge nets passed orbit testing with flying colors this week.

To test the nets in a space-like atmosphere, Canada’s Falcon 20 aircraft flew parabolic arcs. Each arc provided 20 seconds of weightless conditions as the plane fell through the sky and cancelled out gravity.

Over the course of 21 parabolas and two days, twenty net tests were conducted inside the aircraft.

The rainbow-colored nets were packed inside paper cartons. Each corner was weighted to help it entangle its target. A compressed air ejector shot the net at a satellite. The thinner version of the net proved more successful than the thicker one.

The ESA reported that the nets worked so well that they usually had to be cut away with a knife.

The National Research Council of Canada, Poland’s SKA Polska and OptiNav and Italy’s STAM were involved in the ESA project.

Read more here.

Thanks to Instapundit