Here's How Scientists Want to Recycle Space Junk

Any other ideas?

By Nicole Carpenter

There's a lot of junk in space—almost 500,000 pieces of it, according to NASA. The space junk isn't just floating around, either. It's moving at speeds up to 17,500 miles per hour, which is fast enough for even a small piece to cause major damage to satellites and spacecrafts.

NASA currently tracks space junk in efforts to prevent collisions, but one research lab from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, wants to create a spacecraft that takes in space junk and uses it as fuel. They want to capture debris and grind it into a useable, ion-charged powder, producing a thrust as it ejected from the spacecraft. The trust is used to maneuver the vehicle and to continue collecting more space junk.

This system, however, doesn't power the ship. The researchers say they'll look into powering the ship with solar or nuclear power.

Space junk can be natural—meteoroids—or man-made. Man-made debris is stuff like "nonfunctional spacecrafts, abandoned launch vehicle stages, mission-related debris, and fragmentation debris," NASA says. This means the kind of fuel the Chinese spacecraft takes in will differ depending on its material, varying the amount of power it generates.

Nicole is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter.

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