A Vacuum Cleaner for Destroying Space Junk

04 April 2012

Senior software engineer Jon Richards shows data collected by the Allen Telescope Array at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, last April

JIM TEDDER: I’m Jim Tedder.

CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: And I’m Christpher Cruise with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. Today, we tell about an effort to destroy unused spacecraft and other objects floating high above the Earth. We also have news about SETI -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

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JIM TEDDER: It just may be the world’s most costly vacuum cleaner. The price of CleanSpace One is eleven million dollars. But yet, it has a big job to do. Recently, researchers in Switzerland announced plans to build this new cleaning device. The researchers work at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

CleanSpace One will not be for use in homes or businesses. It will be shot into space to help remove the thousands of pieces of space junk floating around up there.

CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: Last year, we reported on the problem of space junk. Over time, many unused spacecraft have hit each other far above the Earth. Big pieces break into thousands of small pieces. Sometimes they fall back into the atmosphere and burn up. But when they do not, it creates big problems.

Scientists fear that if something is not done to remove these objects, it may soon become too dangerous to send people and machines into space. There is a large chance that they might crash into some of this junk. So that is why the Swiss researchers are developing the new device.