The British satellite successfully deployed a network in orbit to demonstrate how to capture space debris. The event took place at an altitude of more than 300 km above the Earth. This was one part of a series of tests that in the near future will demonstrate various technologies for removing excess equipment that flies in near-earth orbit.

It is estimated that about 7.5 thousand tons of space debris drift aimlessly, which creates the danger of its collision with existing spacecraft.

Successfully named satellite RemoveDebris shot a video during the execution of its mission. In the short clip shows a small box (garbage), hovering in space. Suddenly, the satellite releases a bright network, exciting and compressing this garbage. “It worked the way we hoped,” said Professor Guglielmo Aglietti, director of the Surrey Space Center.

If it were a real capture, not a demonstration, the network would be tied to a satellite, which then pulled garbage out of the sky. Since it was just a demonstration, the network and the box (which was actually pushed out of RemoveDebris to act as a target) were subsequently simply dropped and burned in the atmosphere. Soon, RemoveDebris will check the new camera system to track down space junk. Later there will be a demonstration of a harpoon that can catch debris in space. Finally, RemoveDebris will unfold a large membrane that will protect it from debris from the upper atmosphere.

Millions of discarded metal parts and other materials are now in orbit, from old rocket segments to astronaut’s accidentally fallen instruments. If we do not begin to solve the problem of space debris now, it will become a serious threat to operating satellites.

“If there will be collisions of cosmic bodies, and such precedents have been more than once, they will create a lot of space debris. After which this debris will collide with other spacecraft and, as a result, even more space debris will be generated. This is a kind of snowball effect.

The problem of space debris is particularly relevant, since many companies are in the planning stages of launching thousands of satellites. Already there are calls for a tough new approach to the licensing of these spacecraft. The approach is to require the introduction of satellite operators the ability to quickly knock down any of their hardware that fails in orbit so as not to clutter up outer space.