BBC reports on a new invention – a cube that releases a sheet of plastic to clean up space junk:
Residual air molecules still present in the spacecraft’s low-Earth orbit will catch the sheet and pull the object out of the sky much faster than is normal.
The Surrey Space Centre team says the concept could be fitted to larger satellites and even rocket stages.
The group also envisages that a mature system would even be sent to rendezvous and dock with redundant spacecraft to clean them from orbit.
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It is thought more than 5,500 tonnes of junk now clutters the region of space just a few hundred km above our heads.