Wherever we humans go, we definitely leave our signs of being there behind. In the very ecosystem, you may or may not find signs of a lion, for example, but you will somehow find signs of the human race, no matter where you are.

Such has been the impact of our kind on the planet. A lot of the effects that we have had on the planet are negative one. Yes, there have been positive ones too, but the negative ones are the ones that are glaringly obvious.

Take pollution for example. We have contaminated our air, water and soil around us, so much so that other species have been wildly affected by it as well. I mean we haven’t even spared space from our ill effects.

There are at least 500,000 pieces of space junk, orbiting our planet, which are a constant threat to our satellites, space stations or even other space missions. If cleaning up pollution on Earth is hard, you can imagine how hard it must be up there! That’s why researchers have suggested some pretty sci-fi like ways to deal with the problem.

Pushing It Away From Earth

Basically, there are three things we can do with space junk. Either we can push it out into space, destroy in orbit or we can push it down to Earth. Pushing it away from Earth sure sounds like the least problematic.

But not many projects are actually aiming to do this as that would just mean spreading more and more junk out into space rather than dealing with it directly.

One project that wants to try this out however, is called CleanSpace One. It is expected to launch in 2018 which would see the Clean Space One satellite that would connect with a decommissioned nanosat to push it out into space.

The company is also testing out other methods of space junk removal like capturing and destructive reentry it will take years before any concrete solutions can be deployed full scale.

Destroying In Orbit

The half a million pieces of space junk floating up there, come in all shapes and sizes. Some are only a few centimetres across and some are larger (more than a few feet across).

Destroying the larger pieces is not entirely a good idea, as it will only create a large number of smaller pieces to deal with. But destroying the smaller ones can be something that might work. In fact, there are 170 million pieces of debris smaller than 1 cm. So, this could be pretty useful.

Recently, I read an article about Russian scientists who are developing a space laser to completely obliterate space debris, no signs left behind. If this is done effectively, it could really clean up a lot of junk much faster than other methods.

Push It Down

If we could figure out a way to just push the tiny as well as medium sized pieces down towards the planet, the rest will be handled by our atmosphere. As these pieces make their way towards Earth, they get burnt down in the atmosphere.

One of the main ways that scientists are trying to do this is by using lasers to shoot these pieces so that their speed could decrease just enough so they start falling towards the planet.

Some other suggested ways are to use nets or sails to capture the debris, robotic arms to push them down, and even space garbage trucks to collect space junk and bring them down to oceans to be collected.