Kind: captions
Language: en
On October the 4th, 1957,
the first satellite Sputnik 1 was
launched into space.
[Music]
Although it burned up in the atmosphere
3 months later, many satellites launched
since then have not, leaving us with a
virtual junkyard orbiting the Earth.
Now, those debris represent a real
threat to the television,
communications, and GPS satellites, not
to mention the astronauts. But luckily,
the Swiss have a plan to clean up space.
So, I've come to Loausanne to figure out
how they're going to do it. Most of the
space junk orbiting Earth is within
2,000 km of the Earth's surface.
There are over 22,000 objects larger
than this softball and over half a
million larger than this marble. Now,
all of the orbiting debris is going
about 7 to 8 km/s. But since the objects
are moving relative to one another, the
average speed of a collision is about 10
km/s.
And an object this size going 10 km/s
has about the same impact as a midsized
car going nearly 200 kmh. That's enough
force to destroy any satellite in orbit.
As a veteran of four space flights,
Swiss astronaut Claude Nicodeier knows
the dangers firsthand.
All of the large debris are tracked uh
by radar. We know their orbit exactly.
And sometimes we had to do the small
change in the orbital characteristics of
our spaceship, the space shuttle space
shuttle endeavor
because it was foreseen that that next
day or 2 days later we're going to have
a close approach with with the debris
such that NASA was not feeling too good
about that. And we changed a little bit
our orbit so as to make that distance a
little bit larger.
Fortunately, to date, there haven't been
any serious collisions with manned
spacecraft. But in 2009, a single crash
between two satellites added a whopping
2,000 new pieces of debris.
If we don't do anything, space will
become soon inaccessible because of the
large amount of debris and the high risk
of collision.
So, the Swiss determined to do something
about the problem are extending their
clean country reputation into outer
space.
Swiss space center has launched a
program called clean space one that is a
demonstrator of a capability to remove
debris and the idea is to go and remove
one of two satellites from Switzerland.
One of these two satellites is
appropriately named Swiss cube.
Swiss cube is a small satellite which
you see this is a one:1 model. So this
is the in the right scale. It belongs to
Switzerland.
So, we had to do something about this.
You can't have Swiss junk just floating
around in space.
No, that's not acceptable.
So, the mission for Clean Space 1 is a
proof of concept that a janitor
satellite can be sent into space to grab
a piece of space junk, in this case
Swiss Cube, and bring it back into the
atmosphere where it'll burn up.
But to rendevous with the space junk,
the small janitor needs an incredibly
efficient engine.
Working on the challenge is Professor
Herbert Sheay, an expert in micro
mechanics.
This is your This is our propulsion
system. Little uh silicon uh micro
machine chips. We use something called
electric propulsion which allows you to
emit single atoms with that are
electrically charged and you use an
electric field to accelerate them out.
So you're not burning them, you're
emitting your propellant. And that's
what many small satellites use, but
nothing has been to date been able to
make something this small. So we we do 0
to 60 m an hour in about 3 days.
But laughable as it indeed seems all of
us because there's no friction in space
or negligible friction then if we wait 6
months we have a huge change in speed
and that's how the mission will be done.
Once propelled into the correct orbit
the next challenge is to grab the space
junk. An object tumbling around
uncontrollably without creating more
debris. Our idea is to use a very
compliant system. Kind of think of an
octopus arm. An octopus arm is very
soft, but it can grab any strange shape
and wrap around it and hold it. And
you'll have a grabber that looks in a
very the real one will be more
sophisticated, but it looks like this.
So, it's basically very very soft uh
elastimemer. I'll turn it on in a
minute. You can see how how soft it is.
And the idea is this will be rolled up.
So, it doesn't take up much room. You
get into and we'll have 10 of these in a
series. You get into space, you unroll
it, and then these things can open. And
when you turn a voltage on, you're able
to open this and you turn the voltage
off and it wraps around and it holds the
satellite.
Is this going to be a little bit like
those games where you're trying to pick
up a stuffed toy in the arcade and drop
it somewhere?
Is it going to be like that?
Essentially, yes.
Those games those games can be
incredibly frustrating with those little
arms.
They're built to be frustrating. Whereas
this this is built to be this is built
to succeed.
Can I ask, has anyone ever successfully
gone up and grabbed a piece of space
junk and gotten rid of it?
To my knowledge, no. It's never been
done before.
Uh, and it grabs on.
Ambitious as it may sound, the Swiss
know how vast this junkyard is. So,
their ultimate aims are more modest.
hopefully starting in say 2020 to do a
systematic removal of the large debris
at the rate of five or more per year in
order to contain the increase of the
debris density in low earth orbit. Then
space will continue becoming accessible.
Of course, the exposure to the space
environment is a wonderful thing.
Thank you.
I have come all the way from Australia
to see it for myself. Welcome to Alaska.
I'm just outside of Fairbanks and I'm
trying to find the Northern Lights, the
Royal Borealis.
I will just