The European Space Agency is working to tackle the issue of space debris with the technological version of a big hug.
It hopes to be able to use tentacle-like mechanical arms to embrace a dead satellite and remove it from orbit.
Other options considered include casting a net over the object, using a single robotic arm or firing a harpoon.
At Esa’s ministerial council last month, the agency allocated €412m to space safety programmes, some of which will go towards a mission aimed at removing defunct satellites from orbit.
The head of Esa’s space debris office, Holger Krag, said work on developing the mission would start now with the aim of designing something that could be used again.
“The goal is to make these removal actions happen more frequently, and therefore they need to be cheap,” he said. “The technology that we will most likely use now is actually consisting of some sort of arms, like tentacles, that embrace the object because you can capture the object before you touch it.”
Space junk has become a growing concern as the debris has the potential to collide and cause damage to working satellites. Of the almost 4,500 satellites in orbit, only 1,500 are active.
The UK Space Agency has committed £374m a year with Esa to deliver international space programmes over the next five years.
This will secure its involvement in the mission to remove space junk.
Krag said Esa had a fleet of 20 spacecraft to operate, and for these spacecraft it received several hundred collision alerts a day. Almost all of them were false.
“Why are they false alerts? Because there’s a limited accuracy of the data, and we are acting based on probability. So whenever the collision probability is higher than one in 10,000, we manoeuvre. But that means in 9,999 cases there would have not been a collision if you did not manoeuvre.”
He said the manoeuvres used up fuel and interrupted missions. “If you run a very expensive science mission, in particular, and you have to interrupt the data for one hour in order to fit the manoeuvre in, you have a community of 1,000 scientists waiting for the data and that’s an economic loss that I wouldn’t even know how to put in numbers.”
