. . . and while you’re at it, take a harpoon to catch space junk

A BRITISH team has designed a ‘space harpoon’ to snare orbiting rubbish.

The £13 million RemoveDebris mission aims to remove the 8,000 tonnes of space junk left over by rockets and other deployments, with between 16,000 and 20,000 pieces being tracked as they orbit Earth.

Airbus carried out a test run, with a harpoon attached to a tether piercing the skin of a piece of debris being dangled on a boom about 5ft away from the spacecraft.

Once hit, a barb is deployed to secure the debris.

When in full operation, scientists aim to make the harpoon fire at debris up to 35 yards away. Engineers are still trying to work out how the system can be used to target moving objects.

The harpoon is several years away from operational use, but the experiment is a major step towards cleaning up space junk, as the number of spacecraft launches increases. Astronaut Tim Peake revealed the damage that orbital junk can cause when he shared an image of a chipped window panel on the International Space Station in 2016.

It is believed something as small as a paint chip could have caused the damage, and the European Space Agency estimates there are 670,000 pieces of space junk bigger than 1cm across orbiting Earth.

The harpoon, which is a joint initiative including British efforts from Airbus, the University of Surrey and Surrey Satellite Technology, is capable of travelling at 20 metres a second.

A previous RemoveDebris experiment demonstrated how a net could be used to catch rubbish orbiting the Earth.