This is me, ConnorP, and the contents of my brain when it doesn't belong anywhere else, or even if it does. Various topics, various thoughts, various degrees of seriousness, but all me.
TPM:
The Swiss have had about enough with how messy with space junk low-earth orbit is becoming. And so the Swiss Space Center is doing something about it.
The agency on Wednesday announced that is beginning work on a “janitor satellite” that will begin to clean up Earth’s orbit by latching onto a piece of space debris traveling at 17,400 miles per-hour and dragging it back into Earth’s atmosphere on a suicide mission, causing both the janitor satellite and the piece of junk to burn up.
The janitor satellite, simply dubbed the “CleanSpace One,” is being designed by the Swiss Space Center at the state-run university École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne near Lausanne, Switzerland. It will be a small rectangular shape: Just over 11 inches long, 4 inches wide and 4 inches deep, and cost just over $10 million (10 million Swiss francs) to build and launch. It is set to be operational within three to five years, by 2016 hopefully, according to Swiss Space Center.
