- On February 10th, 2009, somewhere in orbit above Siberia, a Russian military satellite collided with an American communication satellite.
At the moment of collision, each satellite was traveling nearly 36,000 kilometers per hour.
The aftermath created thousands of pieces of debris, a giant swarm of junk littering, one of space's, busiest highways.
This was the biggest satellite collision in history and an eye-opening warning about the worsening crisis of space.
Junk debris from that collision remains in orbit, along with millions of other human made objects.
The solution is obvious, clean up space junk, but actually doing that is not so simple.
Hey smart people, Joe here.
Imagine you're driving down a highway, only instead of an open road, the path in front of you is littered with every vehicle that's ever broken down on that road left where they died.
You not only have to dodge them, but also every bit of debris, vehicle parts, and litter left behind from travelers who didn't fare as well.
A swarm of deadly junk threatening your every move.
This is the crisis we face in space near earth orbits, literally with space junk, dead satellites, rocket parts, lost tools, and countless unknown objects.
Experts fear that we may face a future where we're unable to get new satellites or space stations into orbit, and that could mean the end of space exploration.
While it's still in its infancy, one team of engineers has developed a solution that's part carnival game, part space mission ClearSpace.
One is a claw designed to collect space junk due to launch in 2026.
An idea so bold and unexpected, I had to see it with my own eyes.
The obvious solution is to clean up that space junk.
But how?
Maybe this is the answer.
This is ClearSpace.
In Lausanne Switzerland, researchers here are getting ready to launch an innovative, unexpected, and kind of weird solution for cleaning up space.
Their plan to use this enormous claw to grab a discarded rocket fragment and bring it back to earth.
But let's back up a sec.
How did humans get ourselves into this whole extraterrestrial trash crisis in the first place?
Since the first satellite launch in 1957, the number of objects in orbit has increased exponentially, especially in recent years, with the advent of smaller, cheaper satellites and reusable rocket technology.
- So if you look at the earth, the earth is really big.
- This is Muriel Richard.
She's engineering this space junk claw mission, and I visited her at Clear Space Headquarters in Switzerland to find out how - Typically what we call the low earth orbit is this region.
- Low Earth orbit ranges from 160 to 2000 thousand kilometers above the earth surface.
This is the most crowded orbital highway home to many scientific satellites, space, internet constellations, the Hubble Space Telescope, and most importantly, where astronauts spend most of their time, - Most of the satellites in North Orbit, they're launched very close to the poles.
So there is a high density of object around the poles.
- Polar orbits are crowded because that positioning lets satellites get a complete picture of Earth underneath them.
These orbits all converge at the poles, which is a problem like multiple lanes of a crowded highway system crossing at a single shared intersection.
An object's orbital altitude determines how long an object stays in orbit.
Lower orbits decay more quickly.
- When satellites are launched and they're launched below 500 kilometers, there is still enough atmosphere here that if they are an operational anymore, they will naturally bring, come back down into the earth, into the earth atmosphere.
And they will do this within a few years, a few months to a few years.
- For an object to stay in low earth orbit for many years, like the ISS, it must regularly boost itself up to counteract this atmospheric drag.
But the higher an object is in orbit, the weaker gravity's grip and the longer it will stay in space.
- But if you launch them at 600 kilometers, you're going from years, a few years to 10 years.
- The clear space, one missions aims to collect a satellite fragment currently orbiting near this altitude.
- And our satellite was launched at 700 kilometer altitude.
And, and there you get the a hundred years at - Higher orbital altitudes like geosynchronous orbits, objects here can survive essentially indefinitely.
- You know, an orbit around the earth is something like this, right?
- These objects are all in lots of different orbits - And those orbits can be inclined or not.
- And if you don't get your calculations just right, orbits can overlap and, - And you may have a collision with another object - Where both objects slam into each other with immense energy, - And when they collide, they collide At this crossing point here, this is typically seven an order of magnitude kilometers per second.
So 28,000 kilometer per hour.
Oh my gosh, I have to do this in miles - No hour.
Don't worry.
We're we're, we're talking science language here.
We, we use a metric at orbital velocities.
Something the size of a blueberry has 10 times the energy of a 40 caliber bullet.
Even the smallest space junk at orbital velocities can do major damage to active satellites, space stations, astronauts, you name it.
The more crowded space gets that makes it more likely that objects will crash into each other like cosmos and Iridium did, creating a frightening domino effect of runaway space junk.
An idea memorably explored by Holly.
- This problem has been highlighted by Don Kessler.
He's been saying, okay, at the rate that we are making launches and launching things in space at the rate, we're living things there, at some point it's going to turn into an exponential.
- In a Kessler syndrome scenario, when two objects collide in a crowded orbit, they don't just create two or three more chunks.
They create hundreds or even thousands of new pieces.
And when those collide, they break into even more smaller pieces.
- And so they increase the number of debris.
And so you get into this exponential, this - Horrible feedback loop - That could happen.
- Exactly.
- If Kessler syndrome becomes a reality, getting new satellites or basically anything into space would be like flying a plane through a hailstorm where every piece of hail is a deadly missile.
There's already so much junk and space.
The International Space Station has to take evasive maneuvers to avoid it multiple times a year, NASA has canceled spacewalks.
Astronauts have had to take refuge and escape capsules as debris approach the ISS, but clear space's claw robot could be a very handy answer to this problem.
Good, clear space.
One is a space robot designed to grab a nose cone that's left over from the satellite deployment process.
If you thought that claw game at the arcade was hard, space makes it so much harder.
But clear space is training their robot to be even better than human hands or arcade claw game hands, rather than relying on a ground-based human pilot, clear space is using machine learning to train the cleanup claw to see, find and grab its space, junk target, all on its own free of human intervention.
- So basically what we're doing in the dark room is that we're trying to generate realistic images of the target that we'll find in space.
Hence the black here, everything is dark and the main source of light that we have is then the sun, which creates very high contrast scenes.
- ClearSpace-1 will have an array of cameras that let it see its target, but depending on the position of the sun relative to the target object and how that target object might be tumbling through space, seeing the target is much harder than it sounds.
But where our eyes can intuitively interpret things like perspective and illumination, computer vision has to be trained to do that.
- You can see almost the entirety of the target.
And so you can easily quote unquote determine and see which features are where, and then say, okay, this is this position, but if we move over here and you look at it from here, you're almost only seeing a halo, right?
- You just barely have something on the edge.
Exactly.
And like this really bright stripe I can't look at, so - There's five training the robot to see is just the first problem.
Then researchers also have to figure out how to grab the nose cone without it, and the robot just spinning off in equal, but opposite directions.
They considered using nets or mechanical fingers, but they landed on tentacles, - What we call the tentacles.
Tentacle, okay, tentacles.
- It sounds weird, but think of it this way.
When you catch a ball, you don't wait for the ball to hit your palm and then try to close your fingers.
It would just bounce off.
Instead, you start closing around the ball before it hits your palm so that when it does bounce, you have a grip on it and it can't escape.
- You've created that controlled cage that - Exactly, exactly.
At that point, it's the same.
The the arms are gonna come closer and closer and they will actually make it in a secured fashion, which on the ground it's not easy because gravity is there.
- Gravity makes all of us harder.
You're right.
- In order to make sure clear space one doesn't crash, the robot and the trash have to move at the exact same speed before it deploys the tentacles.
But space junk is also spinning.
So ClearSpace-1 will have to match both velocity and rotation if it wants to capture its target without careening off and becoming space junk itself.
- The baseline of the operation is to do motion synchronization, which means that the target is gonna be moving, but we want to move with it so that the relative movement between us and the target is zero, which makes the capture a lot easier - From the spacecraft perspective, then it then it, it appears, it feels motionless.
Exactly, because they've completely matched their - Emotion, right?
Because we're moving around that and that - Matching the speed and movement of an object seems like no big deal to us because we have eyes and brains that evolve to track and process movement.
But robots don't have that.
- And you can see from here, I know what it looks like.
You've seen it before put potentially so you can figure it out, but humans are very good at that.
Computer is a bit less so, so there's a lot, lot less information that we can use here and that's what we're trying to train our algorithms - With to be able to reconstruct all of that potentially complex motion.
Exactly.
Just from this tiny sliver.
So this is a, a suicide mission and, and in - A way it was a suicide me mission.
And at the same time, having a suicide mission is, is making sure that you don't leave yourself more stuff.
- We'll need fleets of space, garbage, sweepers, and tow trucks in order to clean up our orbital highways.
Clear space is tentacle.
Grabby claw is one way to do this, but other research teams are trying to solve this problem too.
With magnetically docking repair bots to fix broken satellites, even refuel them to prolong their mission life.
Cleaning up space junk won't be enough on its own.
Experts agree.
We'll also need to stop putting new space junk into orbit and planning the full lifespan of every object we put into space.
A difficult challenge considering the treaties around space launches designate space as a common area under no individual country's law.
If we want our future in space to be bigger than our history in space, we have to change our relationship with space and how we keep it clean.
