British scientists have unveiled plans to clean up the junkyard of space by attaching giant sails to orbiting rubbish to drag it down into Earth's atmosphere, where it will burn up.
Fifty years of space exploration have left more than 5,
British scientists have unveiled plans to clean up the junkyard of space by attaching giant sails to orbiting rubbish to drag it down into Earth's atmosphere, where it will burn up.
Fifty years of space exploration have left more than 5,500 tonnes of spent rockets, defunct satellites and abandoned equipment hurtling around the planet and cluttering up the nearest reaches of space.
The build-up of debris, which is growing at 5% a year, is a major threat to working satellites and crewed spacecraft, such as the space shuttle and the International Space Station, which have to alter their orbits occasionally to avoid a direct hit.
Researchers at Surrey University and the space company, Astrium, developed 25-square-metre sails that pack into a "nanosatellite" no bigger than a shoebox, which can be attached to larger satellites and rockets before they are launched.
The scientists plan a trial run, called CubeSail, next year, and hope to sell the sails to satellite and rocket operators if the technology works.
"We need to start equipping our satellites today so we can start to solve the problem," said Vaios Lappas, project leader at Surrey Space Centre. "It would be good for us not to mess up space the way we've messed up our planet."
Lappas said that within a decade, the sails could be pulling space junk into the Earth's atmosphere, where friction from air will cause it to burn up. To do this, the nanosatellite containing the sail would need to home in on a specific piece of space junk and stick to it before deploying its sail.
Next year's test will loo