Remove Debris Mission, From Concept to Orbit

International audienceThe RemoveDebris mission will be the first European Active Debris Removal (ADR) missions to give an in orbit demonstration of the viability of a series of cost effective technologies that can be used to observe, capture and destroy space debris. RemoveDebris is a low cost mission performing key active debris removal (ADR) technology demonstrations including the use of a net, a harpoon, vision-based navigation (VBN) and a dragsail in a realistic space operational environment. For the purposes of the mission two CubeSats will be ejected and used as targets for experiments instead of real space debris, which is an important step towards a fully operational ADR mission