‘Moby Dick style’: space junk gets harpooned like a whale in orbit clean-up test
- Designers hope to one day be hired to take out old satellite and rocket parts that circle Earth and are a threat to spacecraft and working satellites
A harpoon flung from a satellite has successfully captured a piece of pretend space junk, like a whale. The British-led experiment is part of an effort to clean up debris in orbit, hundreds of miles above Earth.
The University of Surrey’s Guglielmo Aglietti said on Friday the steel-tipped harpoon scored a bull’s-eye a week earlier. The harpoon – no bigger than a pen – pierced an aluminium panel the size of a table tennis racket attached to the end of a satellite boom.
The distance was just 1.5 metres (five feet), but researchers were delighted.
A video shows the harpoon slamming into the target and knocking it off its perch, and then the harpoon cable becoming entangled around the boom.
Aglietti said a much bigger harpoon will be needed to snare a real dead satellite – “Moby Dick style”.
