Watch a Satellite Fire a Harpoon in Space in Wild Debris-Catching Test (Video)

[Judi Lynn]

By Tereza Pultarova 13 hours ago

A harpoon designed to capture orbital junk has been successfully tested in space for the first time as part of the active debris-removal demonstration mission called RemoveDebris.

The pen-size titanium harpoon developed by Airbus engineers in the U.K. was fired on Feb. 8 into an aluminum target, which extended from the spacecraft attached to a carbon-fiber boom. During the test, it successfully snagged the target out of orbit and reeled it back to the main spacecraft.

"It's been a really successful test and gives us really good confidence in the harpoon technology that has been developed," Alastair Wayman, advanced project engineer at Airbus who was responsible for the design of the experiment, told Space.com."We have tested it extensively on the ground but obviously, there are things that we can't completely simulate on the ground." [Photos: Space Debris Images & Cleanup Concepts]

The ground-control team, based at Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (which built the spacecraft) in Guildford, the U.K., had to wait for three days to download all the data to make sure that the experiment, which was captured in slow-motion video, went as planned. "The ground-control team had to upload a series of commands for the harpoon and the spacecraft, which the spacecraft then autonomously executed when it was at the right angle to the sun so that we could get a good video of the experiment," Wayman said.

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https://www.space.com/space-junk-harpoon-removedebris-satellite-video.html?utm_source=notification