The European Space Agency has awarded an 86 million euro contract to ClearSpace to carry out the first removal of space debris from Earth’s orbit.
According to a ClearSpace press release announcing the contract,
ClearSpace-1’s mission is to develop a robot-like spacecraft with four articulated arms which will ultimately enable space debris to be removed safely. ClearSpace-1’s first task scheduled for 2025 after launching from the Kourou space centre in French Guiana, will be to bring down the Vespa (Vega Secondary Payload Adapter) left by the Vega rocket placed in orbit in 2013, the size of a 112 kg satellite. With its articulated arms, the robot will remove Vespa and move it closer to the earth’s atmosphere where it will burn up and disintegrate.
ESA Director General Jan Wörner said of the plan,
Think of all of the orbital captures that have occurred up until this point and they have all taken place with cooperative, fully- controlled target objects. With space debris, by definition no such control is possible: instead the objects are adrift, often tumbling randomly. So this first capture and disposal of an uncooperative space object represents an extremely challenging achievement. But with overall satellite numbers set to grow rapidly in the coming decade, regular removals are becoming essential to keep debris levels under control, to prevent a cascade of collisions that threaten to make the debris problem much worse.