RemoveDEBRIS consortium wins prestigious space award
A team from Surrey Space Centre (SSC) and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) has won the highly prestigious Sir Arthur C Clarke award.
RemoveDEBRIS team at Surrey Space Centre.
The award, in the category Space Achievement – Industry/Project team, recognises the RemoveDEBRIS mission which has successfully demonstrated four novel space debris removal technologies since its launch in 2018. The honour was accepted by Professor Guglielmo Aglietti, Project Principal Investigator, and Martin Unwin of SSTL, on 14 November during the Reinventing Space Conference in Belfast.
Organised by the British Interplanetary Society, the Sir Arthur C Clarke Awards, better known as ‘The Arthurs’, recognise individuals and teams that have made the most outstanding achievements across the remit of space.
The RemoveDEBRIS consortium is led by SSC in collaboration with SSTL, with technical support from mission partners Airbus, ArianeGroup, CSEM, Inria, ISIS and Stellenbosch University. To date, the mission has successfully performed four demonstrations: deploying a net designed to capture a target cubesat; testing a LiDAR vision-based navigation system to track a cubesat; demonstrating a harpoon fired at 20 metres per second to penetrate a target; and deploying a large dragsail to speed de-orbit into the Earth’s atmosphere.
Read more about the RemoveDEBRIS mission.
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