These space junk fly around the earth at a very high speed, which will pose a great threat to the useful spacecraft in orbit, and it will be very dangerous if the scrapped spacecraft with large volume falls to the ground and lands in densely populated areas. A few years ago, there was an American sci-fi movie called "Gravity", which was created on the background that space junk caused spacecraft such as the space station to crash.
In recent years, Musk even proposed to build a space Internet and launched a satellite chain plan with more than 40,000 satellites. As many as 60 satellite chains will be launched into space every month or two. There are also some other companies in the world who want to build a space network and prepare to follow up and launch their own space Internet satellite plans, which will also make more and more satellites in space, and these satellites will soon become space junk.
These space junk flies around the earth, which is not only dangerous to spacecraft available in space, people and buildings on the ground, but also occupies the orbit itself, making the spacecraft ready to launch have no better orbit available. These situations also show that it is more and more urgent for human beings to remove space junk.
Recently, scholars such as Kang Rongjie and Dai Jiansheng from the Research Center of Modern Machinery and Robotics of Tianjin University led the team to develop a new type of continuous bionic robot, which is said to be able to catch space debris with rockets.
This robot consists of a central skeleton made of superelastic nickel-titanium alloy and a constraint disk printed in 3D. It has an extensible structure similar to an elephant's nose or an octopus (octopus), and it can reach out and grasp things, because it can control its body structure by driving wires evenly distributed around the restraint disk, thus actively bending or passively deforming according to environmental changes, which makes it like a dexterous arm, and it can grasp things around it at will. Pack a few more and you'll be like an octopus.
There is also a camera at the end of the grab, which allows its manipulator to bypass obstacles and catch the target. Experts say it can be "applied to the capture of non-cooperative targets in space", that is, "space catcher". The bionic robot can perform actions such as obstacle avoidance and exploration in an unknown environment, so it will not be damaged by space garbage, and can capture failed satellites and space debris without a complex sensing system, and can also be applied to disaster environment rescue. The research results have been published in "Robot-based Research".
References:
"Shenzhen Business Daily" February 4 article "China has developed a space trap, which will be used to remove space junk"