Japan Sends Long Electric Whip Into Orbit, To Tame Space Junk 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption JAXA JAXA 
 
 A cable that's as long as six football fields has been launched into orbit — and when it's deployed, it'll test an idea to knock out orbital debris. Japan's space agency sent the electrodynamic tether into space along with supplies for the International Space Station. 
 
 Reels aboard the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kounotori 6 craft will deploy the 700-meter (2,296 feet) tether, essentially unspooling a clothesline in space that could help clean up the roughly 20,000 pieces of potentially hazardous space debris that are tracked by systems on Earth. 
 
 Those pieces of junk are dangerous enough on their own — but they can also generate thousands more smaller pieces of debris if they collide, creating even more risk to the space station and satellites orbiting the Earth. 
 
 With the official acronym of EDT (for electrodynamic tether), the Kounotori's cable "is a promising candidate to deorbit the debris objects at low cost," JAXA says. 
 
 As illustrated by a video, the Japanese agency's plan is to use the electrified tether — counter-weighted by a 20 kilogram (44-pound) end mass — to slow down and redirect space junk into a safe but fiery reentry into the atmosphere. 
 
 YouTube 
 
 According to the video, the tether will be able to change its position relative to the Kounotori craft by the use of force that's generated by an electric current and the Earth's magnetic field. The video also depicts the tether being attached to a large piece of debris so the space trash can be guided down into a destructive reentry. 
 
 Space debris has been seen as a problem for years — back in 2011, the National Research Council said the number of items had reached "tipping point" in terms of the dangers they posed to astronauts and spacecraft. 
 
 As we reported last year, "According to the Royal Institution in London, there are about 20,000 pieces of tracked space debris, ranging from larger than an apple to as big as a school bus. (There are far more objects smaller than that, including millions of pieces of debris too tiny to track, according to NASA.)" 
 
 There's a good chance we could see video of the new JAXA system being tested: Deployment of the tether will be monitored by cameras aboard the Kounotori. 
 
 According to JAXA, the Kounotori is scheduled to dock at the International Space Station on Dec. 14; the tether won't be unleashed until the Kounotori leaves the space station bearing a new cargo of waste — with the entire craft destined to burn up on reentry. ||||| Japan's JAXA space agency launched a cargo shuttle carrying more than four tons of food, water, and supplies to the International Space Station on Friday. And, there's a really long whip. 
 
 Japan's H-IIB rocket with a capsule called Kounotori, or stork, lifts off at the Tanegashima Space Center in Tanegashima, southern Japan, on Friday. The Japanese capsule contains nearly 5 tons of food, water and other supplies, including new lithium-ion batteries for the International Space Station’s solar power system. 
 
 Japan’s space program, JAXA, soars this weekend after its robotic cargo spacecraft began its four-day journey to the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday. 
 
 Onboard the spacecraft, called Kounotori (after the Japanese word for “white stork"), are more than four tons of cargo, including JAXA’s massive debris clearing space whip and a new array of lithium ion batteries for the space station’s solar arrays. 
 
 Friday’s cargo launch is particularly important after the failure of a Russian Progress cargo launch earlier this month. Several other cargo launches have met similar fates over the past two years. This is JAXA’s sixth cargo launch to the ISS. 
 
 "Spaceflight's not an easy thing," said NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson in an interview aboard the ISS. "We just have to keep pressing ourselves to do the right thing, make sure we're doing all the right tests ... so that we don't have these problems," the Associated Press reported. 
 
 Other supplies being delivered by Kounotori include several tons of food and water. The batteries being ferried by the craft will also be immensely helpful for the ISS crew members, who plan to replace the older nickel-hydrogen batteries now used to store energy from the station’s solar panels. 
 
 Perhaps the most interesting piece of cargo, however, is a 2,296-foot tether made of aluminum and steel. Space experts hope to use this tether to help clean up the more than 20,000 pieces of space debris that have been judged “potentially hazardous” to further space exploration, as NPR reported. 
 
 Scientists have been concerned about space debris for a long time. After six decades of space exploration, hundreds of old satellite pieces and miscellaneous space junk now litter the Earth's orbit zone that many satellites must traverse. As long ago as 1984, the European Space Administration (ESA) began concerned about the dangers this debris might pose. 
 
 “Up to now, there has been more concern about radio interference among satellites than about collision. But as ESA points out, a collision would not only damage satellites, it would create a cloud of debris. There would be a growing and uncontrollable risk of further collisions,” reported The Christian Science Monitor’s Robert Cowan in 1984. 
 
 “Thus it seems that development of the space frontier has already reached a level where neighborhood trash removal has become a necessity.” 
 
 This May, the ISS itself was damaged by a tiny flying piece of debris when it hit the windows of the station’s cupola. The debris, which scientists speculate was likely a flake of paint or small piece of metal, caused a chip in the cupola’s window. While the ISS was built to withstand strikes such as the one in May, the incident is indicative of a bigger problem. 
 
 Today, NASA says that it is tracking more than 500,000 pieces of space debris in orbit, all of which could severely damage a satellite or spacecraft. Pieces smaller than a single centimeter are dangerous enough, NASA says, but anything larger than a single centimeter could penetrate the shields of the ISS. 
 
 And when two or more pieces of debris strike each other, the result is thousands more pieces of potentially dangerous junk orbiting the planet. 
 
 JAXA hopes to eliminate some of this problem with its massive electrodynamic space tether, which the agency hopes will be able to snag and redirect larger pieces of space junk into Earth’s atmosphere, where they will burn up and become harmless upon entry. 
 
 If the space tether works, it will be good news for space agencies. Unfortunately, however, JAXA will only have one shot at using the “space whip” on the Kounotori’s return trip to Earth before the cargo shuttle burns up upon re-entry. ||||| On Friday a number of movers and shakers in the space sector met at London’s Royal Astronomical Society to support the launch of ‘Adrift,’ an interactive art project that aims to raise awareness about the dangers of space debris. 
 
 In the 60 years since the launch of Sputnik I—the first artificial object placed into orbit—space agencies have managed to create hundreds of millions of pieces of orbital debris. The vast majority of this debris (nearly 200 million pieces) are smaller than one centimeter, about 670,000 pieces are between 1 and 10 centimeters, and approximately 29,000 pieces of debris larger than 10 centimeters in orbit. 
 
 While millions of specks of space trash might not sound so bad, when they’re moving at thousands of miles per hour in orbit they can do serious damage. ESA astronaut Tim Peake reminded the world of this threat earlier this year when he took a picture of a 7mm crack in the International Space Station’s cupola window that was likely caused by a rogue chip of paint only a few thousandths of a millimeter across. 
 
 Chip in the ISS cupola made by a speck of paint. Image: ESA 
 
 While it is impossible to track the millions of pieces of micro-debris in orbit, NASA and other space agencies are keeping tabs on most of the 29,000 larger pieces of debris, which pose a serious threat to the safety of crewed missions. These pieces of debris are the subject of ‘Adrift,’ a collaborative art project led by Cath Le Couteur and Nick Ryan who have created a machine that tracks 27,000 pieces of space junk in real time and turns them into music as they pass overhead. 
 
 The art project also allows anybody to ‘adopt’ one of three different pieces of space junk, which will tweet at you every time the object passes overhead. The first piece of space debris up for adoption is the Vanguard I, the first solar powered satellite. Vanguard I was launched by the United States in 1958 making it the oldest object still in orbit. 
 
 Then there’s the SuitSat, a Russian spacesuit that is full of trash was pushed out of the ISS in 2006 with a radio unit attached to it. The suit was nicknamed Ivan Ivanovich—the Russian equivalent of John Doe—which was also the name given to the mannequin used to test the Vostok spacecraft in the lead up to the Soviet Union’s first crewed missions. The SuitSat-1 fell out of orbit within a few weeks of its deployment, so it is unclear which piece of debris the SuitSat’s Twitter account is tracking. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 The final piece of space junk up for adoption is a piece from Fengyun-1C, a Chinese weather satellite that was intentionally destroyed by China with an anti-satellite missile in 2007. This particular event nearly doubled the amount of space debris in orbit in one fell swoop and raised concerns about the calamitous results of kinetic warfare in space. 
 
 The music machine and debris adoption program are all in service of ‘Adrift,’ a mini-documentary focusing on the threat of space junk and the ongoing attempts to get it under control. Barring space warfare, some scientists are wringing their hands at the idea of Kessler Syndrome, an uncontrollable chain of collisions that would exponentially increase the amount of space debris in orbit once the amount of space junk in orbit reaches a certain threshold. Which is to say that if you want a vision of the future, imagine space junk ramming into space junk…forever. 
 
 Although the International Telecommunications Union now requires that anyone who deploys a satellite must be able to deorbit the satellite within 25 years, space scientists are still grappling with how to remove the space junk that is already in orbit to stave off catastrophe. This has led to some pretty wild ideas for capturing and disposing of space junk, including blasting it with lasers and huge nets. 
 
 Check out the mini-documentary here:
– Can a whip as long as six football fields destroy some of the 500,000 pieces of space junk spinning around Earth at 17,500 miles per hour? Japan's space agency sure hopes so. JAXA launched its Kounotori 6 spacecraft on Friday with tons of supplies bound for the International Space Station, where it's expected to arrive on Wednesday, reports NPR. Also on board is a 2,300-feet electrodynamic tether, or EDT, made of aluminum and steel, in the works for more than a decade. JAXA says it will use an electric current and Earth's magnetic field to slow down debris and shove it out of orbit and toward Earth's atmosphere, where it will burn up. The EDT and the Kounotori, which will also carry waste from the ISS, will then meet the same fate. It's unclear how many pieces of space junk might be destroyed using the EDT, but this is mostly a test. If all goes well, JAXA plans to create a second tether up to six miles in length, reports Bloomberg. The BBC notes this is one of a few efforts underway to tackle space junk, which poses hazards for astronauts and their equipment. In May, for example, a tiny piece of space junk—possibly a speck of paint—chipped a window in the ISS' Cupola observatory, reports Christian Science Monitor. As the ISS wouldn't stand a chance against some debris as large as a bus, it has to be moved to avoid an impact, says project chief Koichi Inoue. Kounotori's EDT "is a promising candidate to deorbit the debris objects at low cost," JAXA says. (You can now adopt space junk.)