It is slightly smaller than a trash can and has about the same purpose: collecting waste, but in space. The device is called Elsa-d and will depart from Russia’s Baikonur launch site next week. Elsa-d was built by Astroscale, a trading company with headquarters in Tokyo and offices in several countries, including Great Britain. Astroscale was founded seven years ago and provides governments and (telecom) companies with cleaning debris from their space activities (see box).
Elsa is short for End of Life Services by Astroscale. The letter “d” indicates the explanation. The device shown in the picture consists of two parts. The big part, with solar panels, is called the service. The smaller block is its client, which is the size of the moving box. These two are stuck together. But when the Elsa-d is put into orbit with a Soyuz rocket, it will release its client a few meters away and then catch it again.
Unexpected strangers
The Elsa-d uses a magnetic arm for this and the first test should prove that it works in space. In a second experiment it gets more complicated. Space debris not only hangs a few feet away and remains stationary, but flies through space on all its axes. In the second trial, the customer is released again, but with one click, causing unexpected crashes. In addition, it is hundreds of meters away from service.
Elsa-d must now approach his client, measure what he is doing, and start making exactly the same twisting movements so that she can grasp the client again with his magnetic arm. In a third experiment, the client will be many miles from the server, and Elsa-d must prove that he can locate and then grab a specific piece of space debris in orbit.
The final part of the mission is to clean up trash: the servant and his client go to Earth and are released into the atmosphere. Due to its high speed, the air resistance causes heating and the waste and its space debris are burned. If you want to get an impression of the entire Japanese mission, you can watch the animation below.
Deadly collisions with space debris
The mission, starting next week, should primarily demonstrate that the technology developed to remove space debris works. Astroscale is already working on the next step. The company received a contract from the Japanese space agency Jaxa last month. Like fellow organizations in the United States (NASA) and Europe (ESA), JAXA understands that Earth’s immediate environment must be cleaned up to avoid deadly collisions by chopping off space debris.
In the first project, Jaxa wants to remove the last stage of a previously launched missile. The giant, which weighs several tons on Earth, orbits the planet. Picking up and cleaning up would be a very different story from the Elsa-d mission. However, the rocket stage is several times larger than the customer’s Elsa-d will play, it has no iron and cannot be grasped with a magnetic arm.
In this case, it is likely that a robotic arm could be developed that could accommodate the obsolete part of the missile. But this is for later. In the first part of this Japanese mission, Astroscale will launch a satellite to investigate this piece of space debris up close, from a distance of a few meters, and to map its immediate surroundings. It should happen next year, after which Jaxa can devise a second phase to release the Colossus into the atmosphere for cleaning.
Microgravity
Robotic arms are the technology that ClearSpace also chooses. This young Swiss company was founded three years ago from the Technical University of Lausanne and has recently won the first contract offered in the new debris removal program for the European Space Agency (ESA).
In this first mission, ClearSpace will launch a four-armed robot from the Kourou launch site in French Guiana in 2025. He must use it to recover part of a missile launched in 2013. The portion now orbiting the Earth is very large. ; You will weigh more than a hundred pounds on Earth.
In the microgravity of near space, almost none of this weight remains. This sounds useful, but it makes recovering space debris very complicated: a little wrong and a piece of debris can disappear from view at any moment. Or worse, it can be damaged and broken to pieces, adding to the space junk problem. Again, the debris removal engine, simply called ClearSpace-1, must first accurately figure out where the piece of space debris is and how it is spinning, in order to catch the giant on a trajectory.
Swiss craftsmanship
It’s a € 100 million project, and it was a surprise that Esa knew it as a young Swiss company. Switzerland is a member of the European Space Agency, but it is not a big country in space flight. Why was ClearSpace Swiss started? “Why not?” Founder Luc Piquet said this recently in an interview with Innovaud, the Swiss innovation agency. “Our country has great universities and engineers, and a long tradition of craftsmanship. Made in Switzerland, people associate high quality with reliability, and this also applies to aviation technology. ”
According to the Japanese Nobuo Okada, founder of Astroscale, it will be a matter of preparing satellites for departure for disposal at the end of their working life. His company developed a round plate with optical and magnetic properties, which is now installed on the customer. This allows Elsa-d to find the customer and connect magnetically. This panel can be installed on any future satellite. Scrapers would help.
What a mess
Space is cool and empty, but there is a dump near Earth. More than half a million pieces of space debris orbit the Earth. A small part of it has a natural origin: meteorites that, like the earth, revolve around the sun and approach the planet. But most of it is human waste, ranging from tiny pieces to whole pieces of rocket orbiting the Earth.
This space debris is not only a shame, but also a great danger. The pieces revolve around the earth at a speed of 28,000 kilometers per hour. At these speeds, even the smallest particles of debris can cause a devastating collision with satellites in orbit or, for example, with a space station.
Space agencies ESA (Europe) and NASA (US) estimate that such a collision, with the current amount of space debris, takes place once every ten years. This doesn’t look like much, given the sheer amount of space junk, but it’s a lot of space.
Waste cloud
Known collisions included in 1996 when a French satellite was damaged by the remains of a missile – also French – launched a decade earlier, and in 2009 when a retired Russian satellite collided with a commercial US satellite, which wasn’t just the end of the lifetime meant of the latter, but a bonus. Then she added about 2,000 pieces of debris to the garbage cloud.
Therefore, the chances of colliding with existing space debris is really high. Chaos continues to grow as humanity brings more and more equipment into space. In the first decade of this century, an average of 72 satellites were put into orbit every year. There are now more than 125 per year, ESA said, and the number will increase dramatically as new and advanced versions of the Internet are built.
Indeed, the International Space Station and larger satellites sometimes have to change course to avoid hitting debris. But not all space satellites have the engines to do this.
Space agencies around the world have been working together to develop guidelines to reduce the remnants of launches and move satellites that are no longer in orbit where they do not get in the way. These guidelines are not enough. Some debris must be removed to reduce the risk. If more dangerous items are chosen, the number to store will be limited. The technology for this is now under development. But they are very expensive missions.
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