ESA Plans to Harpoon Space Junk with New Satellite

Space junk is a growing problem. Debris from decommissioned satellites and other pieces of material orbit our planet in an ever-widening ring. Now, though, the European Space Agency has a new plan to deal with capturing tumbling satellites: harpooning them.

Decades of satellite launches have left Earth surrounded by a halo of space junk. In fact, there are more than 17,000 trackable objects that are larger than a coffee cup that threaten working missions. These objects could foul up working satellites and could result in the need of costly repairs; even a 1 cm nut could slam into a working satellite with the force of a hand grenade. That's why controlling and eliminating this debris is more important than over.

ESA's Clean Space Initiative is working on doing just that, and its e.DeOrbit mission for flight in 2021 may accomplish that feat. The e.DeORbit satellite has sophisticated sensors and autonomous control that will identify and home in on a target. Yet actually capturing and securing the object is another problem entirely.

Yet scientists believe that they may have a solution. The researchers believe that a tethered harpoon might be able to pierce the target and then reel it in. In fact, a prototype harpoon was shot into representative satellite material in order to assess its penetration, its strength and the generation of additional fragments that might threaten the e.DeOrbit satellite. It turned out that the harpoon worked out pretty well.

Now, researchers are taking the next step. They plan to build and test a prototype "breadboard" version in hopes of adopting the harpoon and its ejection mechanism for the mission. The project will investigate all three stages of harpooning through computer models, analysis and experiments.