WASHINGTON — A payload adapter that’s the goal of a European debris cleanup mission can have itself been damaged by a debris impact.
The European Space Agency said Aug. 22 that it was informed 12 days earlier by the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron, accountable for space domain awareness activities, that it had identified several pieces of debris within the vicinity of a bigger payload adapter called Vespa that has been in low Earth orbit since a Vega launch a decade ago.
The brand new debris, ESA said, likely originated from Vespa after a collision with a bit of debris too small to be tracked. Follow-up tracking by the 18th Space Defense Squadron in addition to European facilities indicates that the payload adapter stays intact. ESA didn’t state what number of pieces of debris from Vespa were bring tracked.
The incident is ironic since the Vespa adapter is the goal of an ESA-backed mission to remove it from orbit. ESA chosen Swiss startup ClearSpace in 2020 to fly a mission that might grapple the 113-kilogram adapter and take away it from orbit, awarding it a contract value 86 million euros ($93 million).
That mission, called ClearSpace-1, passed a review at the top of 2022 that marked the top of its initial design phase. ClearSpace-1 is scheduled to launch in 2026 on a Vega C rocket. The corporate raised 26.7 million euros in January to support work on of the mission.
ESA said within the statement that it was too soon to know if the debris impact would affect the ClearSpace-1 mission: “The event of the ClearSpace-1 mission will proceed as planned while additional data on the event is collected. ESA and industrial partners are fastidiously evaluating the event’s impact on the mission.” That evaluation, ESA added, would take several weeks to finish.
ESA has made space safety, similar to mitigating and remediating orbital debris, a priority. In July, ESA carried out an “assisted reentry” of an Earth science spacecraft, Aeolus, that lacked propellant needed to perform a deliberate, targeted reentry at the top of its mission. That effort ensured the spacecraft reentered over uninhabited territory to avoid any risk to people on the bottom from spacecraft debris that survived reentry.
ESA unveiled plans for a “Zero Debris Charter” through the Paris Air Show in June with the support of three major European satellite manufacturers: Airbus Defence and Space, OHB and Thales Alenia Space. Details in regards to the charter have yet to be published, however the goal is to forestall the creation of recent debris in Earth orbit.
“The principle is a quite simple one,” said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher on the event announcing the charter. “The Zero Debris Charter is a principle where we would really like to be sure that there’s zero debris left behind in space.”
ESA, though, has also contributed to the orbital debris problem. The defunct Envisat spacecraft was abandoned in low Earth orbit when it malfunctioned a decade after its launch in 2002. The massive size of Envisat, which is predicted to stay in orbit for as much as 150 years, makes it a possible source of debris from collisions just like the one the Vespa adapter suffered.
A 2020 study by a gaggle of space sustainability experts ranked Envisat 21st on an inventory of the 50 “statistically most concerning” debris objects in Earth orbit. Envisat was the highest-ranked satellite on the list, following a family of 20 Zenit rocket bodies all in similar orbits.