NASA to Use 'Space Velcro'-Toting Robot to Clear up Earth's 500,000 Pieces of Space Junk

Ever watched that movie “Gravity”, if you have, this article would be really familiar to you, as you know how dangerous space junk could potentially be.

And NASA estimates there's around Estimated by NASA, a figure of 500,000 pieces of waste satellite parts and rocket debris, as well as pieces of  old spaceships flying round our planet at speeds of up to 17,500mph.

This could have damaging results on missions towards the newer future of space travel as well as current communications equipment.

Things become increasingly risky to thread crafts through the junk, as the orbit space around our planet gets filled with junk.

NASA has said to have a few scheduled research projects in place to try and counter the problem - one of which involves deploying "space velcro" that could snatch up debris from the vacuum.

NASA has built the invention of “space Velcro” on the phenonium found on sticky feet of geckos, having microscopic flaps situated on their feet which create an electrostatic charge when they touch a surface.

"What we've developed is a gripper that uses gecko-inspired adhesives," said Mark Cutkosky, a professor of mechanical engineering from Stanford.

"It's an outgrowth of work we started about 10 years ago on climbing robots that used adhesives inspired by how geckos stick to walls."

"There are many missions that would benefit from this, like rendezvous and docking and orbital debris mitigation," said Dr Aaron Parness, of the Extreme Environment Robotics Group at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"We could also eventually develop a climbing robot assistant that could crawl around on the spacecraft, doing repairs, filming and checking for defects."

Any deployable Wall-E-type robot will have to be able to withstand to the harsh conditions due to freezing conditions as well as extremely elevated levels of radiation in space.

The reduce in costs of satellites in 2018 will pave the way to the launch of 100s of them into space which will substantially increase the number of satellites from the 1,300 currently in use.