The UK CubeSail: Tackling Space Debris

The first spacecraft designed to do away with itself was unveiled on Friday. It will try out an idea that could stop space getting clogged up with junk orbiting the Earth.

The debris of abandoned spacecraft and satellites is building up in low Earth orbit. This zero-g scrapheap has grown by 40 per cent in the past four years alone, with the US air force now tracking 19,000 orbiting objects larger than 10 centimetres across. And as chunks of debris strike each other, they fragment further – presenting still more threat of collision to working spacecraft.

The diminutive CubeSail craft, measuring 30 by 10 by 10 centimetres and weighing just 3 kilograms, has been designed at the Surrey Space Centre at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK. It has a solar sail that it can use for propulsion – harnessing the pressure of sunlight, just as a boat's sail harnesses the pressure of the wind – but it can also use the sail as an "orbital brake" to help it de-orbit to a fiery death in the atmosphere.