Harpoon to pick up space junk trialled for first time

A HARPOON designed to spear through space junk and capture it has been tested in space for the first time.

The RemoveDebris mission hopes to address the issue of debris in space left over by past rockets and other deployments, with between 16,000 and 20,000 pieces tracked orbiting Earth.

It was announced yesterday that Airbus carried out the experiment a week earlier, where a harpoon pierces through the skin of a sample piece of debris being dangled on a boom at about one and a half metres away from the spacecraft. Once hit, a barb is deployed on the debris to secure it.

The harpoon is still a number of years away from operational use. But, the experiment is a major step towards cleaning up space junk, as the number of spacecraft launches continue to increase.

British astronaut Tim Peake previously revealed the damage that orbital junk can cause spacecraft, when he shared an image of a chipped window panel on board the International Space Station in 2016.

It is believed that something as small as a paint chip could have caused the damage, as it hurtled towards the ISS.

When in full operation, scientists aim to make the harpoon fire at debris up to 30 metres away.

Engineers back on Earth are still trying to work out how the system can be used in future to target moving objects.

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

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

The group are expected to next test the drag sail part of the experiment on March 12.

Science Minister Chris Skidmore said: “This mission is a powerful example of the UK’s expertise in space technology.”