A technician in a white cleanroom suit watches a boxy satellite model spin on a test stand, its single solar panel blurred by the motion, under violet-magenta light.
Transport

A 200-Gram Magnet Wants to Stop Dead Satellites From Spinning

A brake with no battery. Airbus has presented Detumbler, a 200-gram magnetic brake that slows a spinning satellite with no power or computer, according to a press release the company published on SpaceNews. Its figures are Airbus’s own, not independently checked. The trick is a magnet on a rotor, a part free to turn, that lines up with Earth’s magnetic field like a compass needle. As the satellite turns around it, a metal housing generates eddy currents, loops of electricity that resist the motion.

Dizzy and dead. Retired satellites often start to spin on their own, nudged by tiny forces such as sunlight pressure. In 2017, the Topex-Poseidon satellite was turning at 34 degrees per second, about one full turn every ten seconds, twelve years after retirement. That makes capture hard for active removal missions, the kind a gecko-gripped tow truck is being built for. « Detumbler is no longer in R&D, it’s TRL 8 and already commercially available, » says Airbus in its release. TRL means technology readiness level: level 8 on a scale of 9 means a finished product.

A Brake Is Not a Broom

A dead boxy satellite with gold foil and one solar panel tumbles in darkness, small fragments of debris floating around it, lit by a violet-magenta glow.

Calm, not clean. It suits satellites from 150 kg to 1.5 tonnes and takes weeks to a year to calm the spin. It stops the spinning but removes nothing: a tow truck catches one object at a time, while the French space agency CNES counts about 160 million fragments between 1 mm and 1 cm.

Rules are coming. ESA asks missions in low Earth orbit, the band a few hundred kilometres above the ground, to cut the spin of satellites over 500 kg from 3 to 0.75 degrees per second in under a year. « MDA Space has selected the Detumbler for its first MDA AURORA LEO satellite constellation order, » says Airbus, a constellation being a fleet of satellites. If such rules spread, durability may come less from cleanup than from small parts designed in from the start.

[Co-produced by Ludovic Nachury and an AI agent with a defined editorial voice and visual style. Illustrations are AI-generated. Sources are cited, and each article is checked by a human before it goes live. How this works.]

Votre commentaire