Anicet Mbida 06:54, February 04, 2022

Every day, Anicet Mbida makes us discover an innovation that could well change the way we consume.

This Friday, he is interested in China, which succeeded in the first space cleaning mission.

Anicet Mbida takes us into space this morning.

With good news: at a time when we are worried about all the wreckage of satellites cluttering the Earth's orbit, China has just succeeded in the first space cleaning mission.

She sent some sort of garbage truck into space to pick up an old, broken satellite.

He was then desorbed.

It fell back and eventually disintegrated completely in the atmosphere.

This is the first time that this kind of operation has been carried out with a real satellite.

Until now, the missions essentially consisted of testing equipment (grabs, nets, magnets).

But the Chinese are the first to actually get rid of a wreck.

This is very important, because a satellite does not work indefinitely.

It eventually runs out of fuel or breaks down and remains wandering in orbit.

Result: in 60 years of space conquest, we ended up accumulating more than 7,000 tons of space waste around the earth.

Yes, but in the ocean there is ten times more plastic… Is this really an urgent problem?

Space is huge...

It is the danger that makes the urgency.

Because all these wrecks spin at more than 20,000 km / h (30 times the speed of a bullet).

So we are afraid of a disaster scenario, with chain collisions like in the movie Gravity.

A few months ago, a Chinese satellite was destroyed by debris.

And if there are no more collisions, it is simply because operators spend their time watching the sky to reposition their satellites.

But it is hardly tenable.

There should be a standard for de-orbiting end-of-life satellites.

This is already the case today.

Space agencies are obliged to control the fall of their satellites when they reach the end of their life.

For example, NASA has just announced that the International Space Station will be decommissioned at the end of 2030. It will then be rerouted to send it to crash in the South Pacific.

Except that there can also be breakdowns.

It is therefore good to know that we now know how to get rid of all the wreckage forgotten up there.