About 22,000 pieces of different cosmic garbage flies around the Earth, which may be a problem for spacecraft. Garbage includes huge discarded parts of the missiles and small parts of the spacecraft, which fell off during the collision. The total weight of all this material is more than 5500 tons, so there is really no desire to face it. Just watch the film Gravity to see a slightly exaggerated version of what can happen.
To avoid such events, several space agencies constantly monitor the paths of each large piece of garbage to make sure that newly neglected spacecraft or satellites using orbit do not encounter this pile of a mess in space. The problem is that the situation today reaches a critical point and the future of near-earth objects can be in danger if you do not do something to clean the Earth’s orbit from our trash.
JAXA Space Agency Cloves to start the cleaning process by launching a kind of extraterrestrial version of the harvesting apparatus, which will rake part of the garbage. The first tests use a network of 1000 feet long, which has a magnetic charge to attract space mess. The network, by the way, was made by Japanese manufacturers of fishing networks.
After garbage is caught in the network, the ship will lead it into the atmosphere of the Earth, where all the contents will burn out.
JAXA has not yet conducted the first test, but is already harvesting small nets for tests. Their plans for the future include the creation of large versions that can capture huge pieces of garbage.
We are waiting for the start of the tests that are scheduled for the end of February.