Swiss ‘Satellite Janitor’ Aims To Clean Up Space Junk
Carl Franzen, writing for TPM’s IdeaLab:
The agency on Wednesday announced that is beginning work on a “janitor satellite” that will begin to clean up Earth’s orbit by latching onto a piece of space debris traveling at 17,400 miles per-hour and dragging it back into Earth’s atmosphere on a suicide mission, causing both the janitor satellite and the piece of junk to burn up.
Franzen also describes just how real the problem of space junk is. (Spoiler: very serious.)