GLOBAL CHALLENGES

'Butterfly Net' to Collect Space Junk

DARPA is sponsoring a project to build a butterfly-net-like machine to capture space junk�the massive amount of material left over from rogue satellites, old spaceships and other defunct manmade objects.

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'Butterfly Net' to Collect Space Junk
A team of scientists is rethinking the concept of the butterfly net on a much larger scale. They've devised a netlike machine to catch all of the dangerous trash that's swirling around our planet.

Space junk includes all of the now-defunct manmade materials that orbit our planet. It can include anything from trashed rocket stages and obsolete satellites to fragments left over from explosions.

A huge amount of manmade debris currently orbits Earth (source: NASA).

While space junk might sound harmless, keep in mind it's whirling around at thousands of miles an hour. At that speed, even a tiny speck of dust can cause significant damage to spacecraft�an especially troublesome risk for solar panels and protective shielding, which guards a craft from space's extreme temperatures and radiation.

A recent NASA study addressed just how hazardous space junk can be. "The greatest risk to space missions comes from non-trackable debris," says Nicholas Johnson, NASA chief scientist for orbital debris. Such declarations have led to increased research on solutions for preventing collisions with space junk, and collecting the rubbish.

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