Old satellites and debris pose a danger to space travel. An international research team with participation from Würzburg is working on a satellite that cleans up space—inspired by the animal kingdom.
In 1957, the former Soviet Union sent the first satellite into space. Since then, Sputnik 1 has been followed by about 20,000 others. While the pioneer burned up when it re-entered Earth's atmosphere just a few months later, many of its successors remain in Earth's orbit as space debris long after the end of their service lives.
It was not until the mid-1990s that awareness of the problem arose, and initial tests to clean up the debris followed in the 2000s. These did not yet lead to practical mission successes in orbit, though. An international research consortium that includes Mohamed Khalil Ben-Larbi, Professor for Space Informatics and Satellite Systems at Julius-Maximilian-Universität Würzburg (JMU), and his team now wants to advance the clean-up of space through innovative technologies.
The project "gEICko: GEcko based Innovative Capture Kit for uncooperative and unprepared Orbital assets" is part of EIC Pathfinder. gEICKo will be completed by the Technical University of Berlin, the University of Padua (Italy), the Tecnico in Lisbon (Portugal), the Fraunhofer Institute for High-SpeedDynamics (EMI), and the Spanish solar company DHV Technology.
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