[ad_1]
A Swiss company is poised to launch our planet’s first space cleanup mission after the European Space Agency (ESA) said Thursday they were signing an 86 million ($ 102 million) agreement with representatives of the Swiss start-up.
The company, ClearSpace, hopes to launch a special satellite by 2025 that would be capable of capturing pieces of space debris in Earth’s orbit. Currently, thousands of dead satellites and many smaller pieces of junk are circling the planet, posing an ever-increasing risk of collision to functioning satellites and even the International Space Station.
“Imagine how dangerous it would be to sail the high seas if all the ships lost in history were still floating on the water,” ESA Director General Jan Wörner said, first announcing the mission last December.
ClearSpace’s founder and CEO also warned that the danger will only increase due to plans to send “hundreds or even thousands of satellites” into low Earth orbit over the next few years.
“There is a clear need for a ‘tow truck’ to remove dead satellites from this highly trafficked region,” he said on ESA’s website.
Read more: German court halts space experiments on hamsters
How will the cleaning work?
The first ever space cleanup mission, ClearSpace-1, would have encountered a discarded rocket fragment weighing approximately 112 kilograms (247 lb). The discarded object, dubbed the Vespa (Vega Secondary Payload Adapter) helped spawn a satellite in 2013. ESA says its sturdy construction would make it a good place to start, with follow-up missions aiming to capture more challenging objects and then several bits of debris at once.
After securing the Vespa, the ClearSpace-1 spacecraft will drag it out of orbit so that it would burn in the atmosphere.
ESA said paying for ClearSpace rather than developing its own space debris remover marks a “new way for ESA to do business”. Although the agency provides “core competencies” and pays for the first mission, the Swiss company would have to cover the rest of the costs through commercial investors.
.
[ad_2]
Source link
