Elsa-d, the world’s first commercial mission to demonstrate a space debris removal system, is expected to be launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on March 20 at 06:07 GMT.
The mission was developed by Astroscale, a Japanese-UK company, and will be conducted from the UK in-orbit servicing control center (IOCC) at Satellite Applications Catapult in Harwell, near Oxford. The End-of-Life Services by Astroscale Demonstration Mission (Elsa-d) is a small satellite designed to locate, meet and hold an unwanted satellite. It will then push it into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it will burn.
Removing space debris is key to space sustainability, allowing new satellites to be operated without the risk of colliding with old ones. The European Space Agency estimates that 3,600 working satellites are in orbit and more than 28,000 pieces of debris are tracked by the US Space Surveillance Network. Over the next decade, more than 10,000 satellites are scheduled to launch, mostly from satellite internet providers such as SpaceX or OneWeb. For this demonstration, Elsa-d takes a smaller spacecraft to serve as a piece of space debris. It will run a number of encounter and recording scenarios before burning up.