Friday, February 15, 2019

"Watch a harpoon successfully spear a piece of space junk"

TR:
The RemoveDEBRIS satellite, created by a team at the University of Surrey, has pulled off its most demanding experiment yet. It fired a harpoon at 20 meters a second at a separate satellite panel that it was holding at the end of a boom. As you can see in the video above, the harpoon succeeded in stabbing and capturing the item. Last year the team also accurately fired a giant net at a satellite to capture it, and tested out a lidar- and camera-based system for identifying space junk.