A piece of space debris being monitored by the European Space Agency as part of a mission to remove trash from space was hit by another piece of debris, splintering the object into more pieces.
ESA confirmed Tuesday that the US’s 18th Space Defense Squadron, which tracks objects in orbit, spotted a number of new pieces in the vicinity of a payload adapter named VESPA that the agency had planned to pluck from space. The most likely cause of those new fragments is “the hypervelocity impact of a small, untracked object” ramming into VESPA, according to ESA.
ESA has been keeping tabs on this piece of space junk for its planned ClearSpace-1 mission in 2026. It would have been the first to be captured and removed from orbit. Most missions that have evaluated debris removal technologies in space have targeted test pieces of debris instead of junk already in space.
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