The RemoveDEBRIS mission has successfully tested a harpoon that was designed to capture space junk in orbit. This marks the second successful attempt for the research team. In September 2018, they deployed a net that wrapped itself around an orbiting …
View More This space harpoon could be a solution to our growing space junk problemCategory: Space Junk
Deploy the space harpoon
Watch out, starwhales.
View More Deploy the space harpoonWatch a space harpoon impale a piece of space debris
The U.S. government tracks 500,000 chunks and bits of space junk as they hurtle around Earth. Some 20,000 of these objects are larger than a softball.
To clean up the growing mess, scientists at the University of Surrey have previously tested a net to catch chunks of debris. Now, they’ve successfully tested out a harpoon.
The video below, released Friday by the university’s space center, shows a test of the experimental RemoveDEBRIS satellite as it unleashes a harpoon at a piece of solar panel, held out on a 1.5-meter boom.
The harpoon clearly impales its target.
“This is RemoveDEBRIS’ most demanding experiment and the fact that it was a success is testament to all involved,” Guglielmo Aglietti, director of the Surrey Space Centre at the University of Surrey, said in a statement. Read more…
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Humans have been tossing junk into space for years. This net could help clean it up.
Space junk is increasingly becoming a big problem for the future of spaceflight, but RemoveDEBRIS is trying to come up with a solution. During a cleanup test that took place in September, the project, led by the University of Surrey, successfully dep…
View More Humans have been tossing junk into space for years. This net could help clean it up.China’s Tiangong-1 space station could fall to Earth on Easter weekend
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China’s decommissioned Tiangong-1 space station is heading back to Earth.
Hour by hour, Tiangong-1 — whose name translates to “Heavenly Palace” — gets closer and closer to re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, and mostly burning up in the process.
Trackers have been following the space station’s descent over the course of a number of weeks, gathering radar images and coming up with estimates for when it’ll come down.
The European Space Agency (ESA) is now predicting that the space station will fall to Earth sometime over Easter weekend, between March 31 and April 2. Read more…
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Elon Musk’s ‘Starman’ Tesla Roadster isn’t your typical piece of space junk
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Launching a Tesla Roadster into outer space may have been ridiculous, but the vehicle is far from being worthless space junk.
The stunt actually served an important engineering purpose.
Engineers commonly load their rockets with heavy simulation cargo — often made of metal — so they can accurately test how these expensive launchers will behave as they blast through the skies at some 18,000 miles per hour.
Elon Musk — in a somewhat grotesque show of wealth — decided to send a Tesla in lieu of hunks of metal, called mass models, which are intended to simulate how a load of cargo will act during a rocket’s flight. Read more…
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View More Elon Musk’s ‘Starman’ Tesla Roadster isn’t your typical piece of space junk