PARIS: The flying fragments of metal – mostly created by satellites crashing into each other – cause a risk to the manned ISS as well as other ships sent up into space.
Researchers from the Riken Institute in Japan want to convert the Extreme Universe Space Observatory’s telescope onboard the ISS into a fibre-optic laser to fire space junk, just like that seen in the film Gravity, out of orbit.
It will then burn up as it comes back towards earth.
The gun would be so precise it could shoot something one centimetre in diameter from 100 kilometres (62 miles) away.
Other ideas to deal with debris include using a net to catch it or shooting it with gas.
Over decades of space exploration millions of pieces of spaceships and satellites have been sent flying by collisions.
In one incident alone, China was said to have caused two million fragments to come loose in an anti-satellite missile test in 2007.
The ISS is routinely having to avoid the debris.
A lead researcher for the Japanese scientists Dr Toshikazu Ebisuzaki said they want to try out the laser plan on a small telescope initially.
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