A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Clearspace-1

Clearspace-1 is a mission being planned by the European Space Agency aimed at testing and refining ways to clear orbital debris.  The spacecraft itself is being developed by a Swiss startup called ClearSpace and the mission has been tentatively targeted for 2026, with its target being an adapter used on an ESA mission in 2013.  

The adapter is a conical-shaped leftover, roughly 250 pounds (113 kg) in mass, from a 2013 Vega launch that sent a small fleet of satellites into orbit.

While the 250 pound leftover has been in orbit since 2013, the mission is a recent idea as the proliferation of satellites in orbit has focused attention on clearing debris out of low earth orbit.  The target orbits at an altitude as low as 410 miles (660 km).

Mission planners have produced this animation of the spider-like Clearspace craft capturing the adapter.

So what's the "funny thing" that happened to the mission?  Apparently, the target has been struck by something in orbit.  Collisions are exactly why they want to get it out of orbit.

Space tracking systems found new objects nearby the adapter, which ESA learned about on Aug. 10. The objects are likely space debris from a "hypervelocity impact of a small, untracked object" that smacked into the payload adapter, the agency said. We may never know if the crashing object was natural or artificial, given it didn't appear in tracking systems.

"This fragmentation event underlines the relevance of the ClearSpace-1 mission," ESA officials wrote in a statement Tuesday (Aug. 22). "The most significant threat posed by larger objects of space debris is that they fragment into clouds of smaller objects, that can each cause significant damage to active satellites."

While it appears only a small piece of the rocket hardware was lost after the collision, the mission plan assumed fully intact hardware. Now evaluations are ongoing to figure out what's next, and the analysis will persist for weeks at the least.

With the mission penciled in for '26, they have time to analyze what's really up there and change their plans appropriately.

Luckily, however, follow-up tracking from the U.S. Space Force and other stations in Germany and Poland found "the main object remains intact and has experienced no significant alteration to its orbit," ESA said. And happily, the risk of these new objects hitting something else is "negligible."

The approach Clearspace-1 uses is apparently to latch onto the target and slow it enough to get it to re-enter the atmosphere.  That seems to only be realistic for larger objects like this adapter.  There's more than that in orbit and this approach looks expensive; after all, it will latch onto the target and then burn itself up along with the target.  There's a staggering number of pieces to deal with, since it has been getting put up there for nearly 70 years with no real efforts to get rid of it. 

ESA estimates that Earth orbit has at least 36,500 debris objects that are more than 4 inches (10 centimeters) wide. Including the smallest trackable objects, that number balloons to an incredible 330 million objects bigger than 0.04 inches (1 millimeter).

Remember also that a lot of meteors are swept up by Earth every day; NASA estimates 48.5 tons of meteoritic material falls on Earth each day.  Before a meteor gets to the surface, it goes through all that junk in orbit and can affect it.  ESA pretty much said they don't know if it was hit by another piece of junk or something like a chunk of meteor.