EU Prepares Mission to Clean Space Garbage

Every space mission launched from Earth often leaves the remains of the spacecraft still floating in space. This could endanger the next mission to space or even fall to Earth as happened to Chinese-made rockets some time ago.

This condition makes the space agency of the European Union, namely the European Space Agency or ESA, to prepare a special mission to clean up space debris that is floating in space and the amount is unknown.

Quoted from Space.com, ESA is collaborating with a Swiss startup called ClearSpace to prepare a mission to clean up space debris which will be carried out in 2025. An experimental mission called ClearSpace-1 will use a robot.

The robot launched has four arms and on its first mission will attempt to capture the Vega Secondary Payload Adapter (VESa), which was abandoned by the Vega ESA launcher in 2013. It is 800 kilometers from Earth and weighs about 100 kilograms.

ESA has signed funding of USD 104 million for the creation and preparation of this mission. However, the ClearSpace robot created is only disposable.

How it works - the ClearSpace robot will capture the object from low Earth orbit and then pull it down into the Earth's atmosphere. Here, both the trash and the robot will burn up in the atmosphere.

According to the ESA's claim, the low-Earth orbit layer is filled with a lot of space junk ranging from low-orbit satellites to launch vehicles from rocket or space launches. All of these objects travel at speeds of tens of thousands of kilometers per hour and can hit active satellites or any other spacecraft in their path.