Astrium UK is exploring the concept, just presented at the International Astronautical Congress, of a space debris harpoon to help clean up Earth orbit. The harpoon would be deployed from a chaser spacecraft, latch onto a piece of debris, and propel it to destructive atmospheric reentry.
Watch the device demonstrated below:
















































































































![A trajectory analysis that used a computational fluid dynamics approach to determine the likely position and velocity histories of the foam (Credits: NASA Ref [1] p61).](http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/fluid-dynamics-trajectory-analysis-50x50.jpg)




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