The goal for an area debris cleanup mission is seemingly in pieces.
A leftover rocket adapter, expected to be faraway from low Earth orbit in 2026, has latest pieces of space debris floating nearby. That is a possible aftereffect of being hit by something small flying through space. The issue was spotted by the 18th Space Defense Squadron of the U.S. Space Force, which monitors satellite movements.
That is an unexpected event for the European Space Agency’s ClearSpace-1 mission, which is a planned test mission to remove that adapter in 2026. The adapter is a conical-shaped leftover, roughly 250 kilos (113 kg) in mass, from a 2013 Vega launch that sent a small fleet of satellites into orbit. Space tracking systems found latest objects nearby the adapter, which ESA learned about on Aug. 10. The objects are likely space debris from a “hypervelocity impact of a small, untracked object” that smacked into the payload adapter, the agency said. We may never know if the crashing object was natural or artificial, given it didn’t appear in tracking systems.
“This fragmentation event underlines the relevance of the ClearSpace-1 mission,” ESA officials wrote in an announcement Tuesday (Aug. 22). “Probably the most significant threat posed by larger objects of space debris is that they fragment into clouds of smaller objects, that may each cause significant damage to energetic satellites.”
While it appears only a small piece of the rocket hardware was lost after the collision, the mission plan assumed fully intact hardware. Now evaluations are ongoing to work out what’s next, and the evaluation will persist for weeks in any case.
The planned ClearSpace-1 mission goals to “rendezvous, capture and take away” the adapter using a spacecraft from the Swiss startup ClearSpace, in keeping with a recent release from mission partner Arianespace. A light-weight Vega-C rocket from Arianespace will bring the cleanup spacecraft to orbit under the ESA-funded mission.
The plan calls for ClearSpace’s spider-shaped vehicle with “legs” to surround after which thrust back into Earth a payload adapter, which is the structure that connects spacecraft with their launch vehicle.
With the planned launch of ClearSpace-1 three years away, there may be time to work out what to do. However the incident creates much more uncertainty for an already difficult mission. There is barely a lot ground stations can see above the orbit of the International Space Station; the unique payload adapter was only six feet or two meters in diameter and at an altitude only as little as 410 miles (660 km).
Luckily, nonetheless, follow-up tracking from the U.S. Space Force and other stations in Germany and Poland found “the most important object stays intact and has experienced no significant alteration to its orbit,” ESA said. And happily, the danger of those latest objects hitting something else is “negligible.”
Space debris from humans will take some time to handle. Nearly 70 years of space exploration has left a staggering variety of pieces to cope with. ESA estimates that Earth orbit has no less than 36,500 debris objects which can be greater than 4 inches (10 centimeters) wide. Including the smallest trackable objects, that number balloons to an incredible 330 million objects larger than 0.04 inches (1 millimeter).