Plans for robotic arm to clean up space junk

CGTN Europe

Space debris is a problem. Thousands of pieces of outdated hardware orbit the earth, just waiting to cause an astro disaster - combining with satellites, for example. Now, Astroscale UK is working with #Airbus on ideas to clean up space junk, designing a robotic arm to grab pieces of junk and drop them closer to earth where they would burn up in orbit. It is planned to be launched in 2026-2027. @Astroscale @airbus #astroscaleuk #spacejunk #spacedebris

Transcript

00:00 Space debris is a big problem for all of us on Earth.

00:05 Basically, since the start of the space age in 1957, we've had a throwaway culture in space.

00:10 We've put lots of objects in space and we've basically not removed them,

00:14 we've not recycled them or done anything else.

00:16 So there's 10,000 tonnes of debris in space,

00:19 near 40,000 objects all floating around in different orbits

00:23 and they are causing congestion in orbit and there are collisions happening

00:28 and therefore lots of other satellites in orbit have to do things like collision avoidance

00:33 to move out of the way of those debris objects,

00:35 which causes problems for the services they're providing every day for us on Earth.

00:39 It's defunct satellites, it's objects that have been ejected from launch vehicles as well.

00:44 And in this example we're using a robot arm to capture the space object in question

00:50 and then bring it close and then bring it down into a lower orbit

00:54 and then release it so it can burn up in the atmosphere.

00:57 remove that debris object then.

Category

Transcript

Recommended