- [Astronaut] Mission abort. Repeat. Mission abort.
- [Host] In the opening scene of Gravity,
a collision with space debris leads to chaos.
- [Announcer] Debris from the missile strike
has caused a chain reaction,
hitting other satellites and creating new debris.
- [Host] Unfortunately this scenario
isn't just made up movie drama.
What if I told you this
was one of the most dangerous things in space?
It's a paint chip. It doesn't look like much,
but debris like this can be catastrophic
when orbiting Earth nearly 10 times the speed of a bullet.
Space has become humanity's biggest junkyard,
and the debris problem is just getting worse.
So some scientists are turning
from exploration to mitigation.
- [Scientist 1] The ClearSpace-1 servicer is a space robot.
That's a huge step toward the space sustainability.
- [Host] This space robot leads the way in an ambitious
and complicated mission to clean up space
before it's too late.
(two objects colliding)
This is Just Might Work,
a show about surprising solutions to our biggest problems.
(fast piano music)
- [Scientist 2] In the early days,
nobody ever thought this would happen.
Everybody said space is big.
Well it's getting a lot smaller.
In the sense that it's getting more and more crowded.
- [Host] There are an estimated 128 million pieces
of space junk in orbit.
That includes things like decommissioned satellites,
the ashes of Star Trek's creator,
and one of Elon Musk's Tesla Roadsters.
Astronauts also have lost a bunch of stuff,
like a tool bag.
- [Astronaut 1] Um, we have a lost tool.
- [Host] And a camera.
- [Astronaut 2] I'm spotting your camera is behind you.
I hope it's tethered.
- [Astronaut 3] It's not. Oh great.
- [Host] But the big danger is the 99 percent of debris
that is smaller than 10 centimeters and can't be tracked.
They're flying around space
at nearly 18,000 miles per hour.
And we don't know where they are until they hit something.
- [Scientist 2] The issue is, you can have one orbit
where the satellite is going around the equator,
and another one that's going around the poles,
and that's a terrible situation,
that's a t-bone intersection.
So a very small piece of debris
can potentially wipe out a very big satellite.
- [Host] Of the more than 500 collisions
and breakups and explosions in space,
one of the most consequential was in 2009
when the Iridium 33 communication satellite
collided with a defunct Russian satellite,
creating thousands of new pieces of space debris.
The International Space Station
actually had to move a few times to avoid that debris field
because it endangered the lives of astronauts on board.
Since we can't track the small stuff,
we can't clean it up yet.
So the plan is to start with the bigger pieces
to avoid the collisions that create more untraceable debris.
- [Scientist 3] The question was, where should we start?
Right? Most of the small pieces of debris
are actually resulting from fragmentation events
of large pieces of debris.
This means that, if you remove one large piece of debris,
you remove thousands of potential future pieces of debris.
- [Scientist 1] What we're bringing in,
with the ClearSpace-1 mission
is the concept of the tow truck.
If you have a mechanical failure,
it is okay to leave the car on the freeway.
There is always, for you, the opportunity
to call the tow truck service
to help you remove your car from the freeway.
So, ClearSpace-1 is really bringing that tilting point
where operators will have now the opportunity
to do more than just repairing it, but actually removing it.
- [Host] The ClearSpace mission
in partnership with the European Space Agency
is to capture, then remove a secondary payload adapter
left in orbit by the Vega Rocket in 2013.
And that's a more complicated undertaking than it sounds.
- [Scientist 1] The trickiest part, which will be the capture,
that will be done autonomously.
The object you're trying to capture is tumbling,
so you're in the case where you're stable,
but the object is tumbling
so you need to recognize what the tumbling is
such that you decide to do a maneuver to match your motion
with the velocity of your object.
And at that point, you can open the forearms
and then go and trigger the capture,
and then you slow down the tumbling,
and you put yourself in a trajectory,
in a path that comes back down into the atmosphere.
- [Host] Upon entering the atmosphere,
the debris and the ClearSpace servicer will burn up.
To give you an idea how complicated this is,
this mission to capture and remove one piece of space junk
is expected to cost more than 100 million dollars
and will take until 2025,
but it's a necessary step to demonstrate
removing debris is actually possible.
- [Scientist 1] Until we actually have proven
that it's feasible to capture an object
that is not cooperative in space,
there will remain the doubts,
and so really what we're pushing here is the boundary.
- [Scientist 3] The clock is ticking.
The question is what kind of contribution
we can give to the world, to the people around us,
and to the future generations.
- [Host] In many ways, we're still at the beginning
of our exploration of space.
But our ambitions hinge on us being able to clean it up.
- [Scientist 2] As we launch more and more satellites,
we are gonna rely more and more on them.
If we don't do something about it,
it definitely could make parts of space unusable.
It's something that we have to look at solutions for now.
[Host] Thanks for watching this episode of Just Might Work.
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