“There will always be a tension between letting debris stay as it is or going to clean up some of it,” says Aglietti. The €15-million (US$17-million) RemoveDEBRIS mission is meant to test cheap ways to drag junk out of orbit. And the European Space Agency (ESA) is working on ideas for a more complex spacecraft that could dispose of space junk or perhaps even re-fuel a satellite in orbit, extending its life, says Luisa Innocenti, head of ESA's Clean Space initiative in Paris. A team spun out of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) is raising money to build a satellite that would throw a conical net around a defunct craft and steer it to its doom. Last year, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency tried to unfurl an electrodynamic tether and hook on to a piece of space debris it failed when the tether did not release as expected. Now researchers are dreaming up ways to clean up some of this orbital junk. In 2009, a US communications satellite accidentally smashed into a Russian one - creating thousands of shards that now hurtle through low Earth orbit, threatening future collisions. That’s big enough to cause serious damage if two objects collide, and the threat is growing as more junk builds up in space. The US military tracks approximately 20,000 objects in orbit that measure at least 5 to 10 centimetres across. “The idea is to be really useful and clean up satellite space.” “This is proof of concept of a new technology,” says Guglielmo Aglietti, director of the Surrey Space Centre at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, and principal investigator for the project, known as RemoveDEBRIS. If they work, future missions might use similar nets or harpoons to ensnare dangerous space debris and drag it to a fiery end in Earth’s atmosphere. The manoeuvres will test ideas meant to address the growing problem of space junk. A few months later, the satellite will ape the spear-wielding Aquaman and fire a harpoon into space. This weekend, in a move Spiderman might envy, one satellite will fling a net at another craft in low Earth orbit. A satellite to test ways of reducing space junk deployed from the International Space Station in June.
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