CleanSpace One: A Giant Pac-Man to Swallow Orbital Debris
EPFL's SwissCube satellite has been in Earth orbit for over five years, and the challenge is ensuring that it wouldn't become just one more piece of space garbage. EPFL researchers are confident they can meet this challenge, thanks to CleanSpace One (CSO). For the past three years, they have been working on this space cleanup satellite that will be sent into orbit to recuperate SwissCube. It will trap the small satellite and the two will combust together in the atmosphere. A major step forward has been made with critical decisions being taken on the design of approach and capture systems. To design the most efficient capture system, the engineers benefited from the collaboration of microengineering students from Hepia Geneva. The students opted for the so-called 'Pac-Man' solution. The prototype resembles a net in the form of a cone that unfolds and then closes back down once it has captured the small satellite.
Transcript
00:00:05 clean space one is a mission that has for purpose to go and remove Swiss cube from its orbit swiss cube is a cube set we sent in space in 2009 so really its objectives are to um increase the awareness that orbital debris is a problem and uh we're doing something about it swiss cube is a very small object it's only 10 cm on its side and so detecting Swiss cube in space will be
00:00:35 our first challenge since this object is spinning it's illumination is changing as a function of time our camera will pick up at the same time very bright and very dark parts of a scene and we want it not to be saturated therefore we need very specific sensor that allow for a very large dynamic range and afterwards we need to process it and we need to do it
00:00:59 in real time in order to feed it to the capture system the next challenge will be to uh actually perform a capture to do this we actually looked at uh various capture system solutions and performed last year uh quite a large tradeoff of different uh designs the idea behind this prototype is to have some kind of conical net that will deploy from a store configuration to a fully deployed
00:01:28 conical configuration the idea is to have the biggest aperture possible to increase the chances to eat the cube while it's near the chaser there will be an extra layer of carefulness that we will have to add in order not to have Swiss cube bounce back before we have time to close and that will be so far that is one of the major issues