CLEANSPACE

Have you ever thought about what happens to the wastes of spaceships that stay around our atmosphere? At the moment, there is a project to clean them that started the first of June 2011 and will last three years.

 

 This project was created in order to protect satellites from debris which can collision with them. Screws, a piece of an antenna broken off from an old satellite or a glove are the most common wastes that we can find over the atmosphere. Recently, the number of this debris is exponentially increasing and they are trapped because of Earth’s gravity.

The project is based on an innovative ground-based laser which can remove dangerous medium debris (from 1 cm to 10 cm).

Actually, there is not a definitive solution to clean up the space but what the project pretends to identify and track the debris, modify its speed and as a result, its orbit course to a lower one with ground-based laser stations. Finally debris will re-entry to the atmosphere where they will burn and “disappear”.

Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona, Catalonia) is cooperating with other business and research groups from countries like Germany, France and Poland. This project has been created by the European Commission to promote innovation and research between European Union countries.