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A Japanese team just took a sharp step toward cleaning Earth’s crowded orbit without ever touching the trash. At Tohoku University, researchers demonstrated a bi-directional plasma thruster that fires two opposed jets of ionized gas, one to slow a target hulk and the other to cancel the recoil that would shove the cleanup craft away.
Plasma is a charged gas, so directing it at debris can bleed off speed until the object dips into the atmosphere and burns up. The catch has always been Newton’s third law, the same push that slows the junk kicks the remover backward. This engine solves that by balancing thrust in real time, keeping the chaser parked on target instead of drifting off.
The team also added a “cusp” magnetic field, a configuration borrowed from fusion research, to corral and focus the plasma. In vacuum-chamber tests, that tweak boosted performance, tripling the deceleration reported in earlier experiments and delivering measured pushes in the tens of millinewtons at kilowatt-class power. Researchers note that this could make future debris-cleaning missions far more efficient, extending operational lifetimes and allowing smaller spacecraft to take on bigger jobs.
Practical perks matter in orbit, and this design runs on argon, which is cheaper and easier to source than xenon common in ion engines. At projected levels, about 30 millinewtons of sustained braking could deorbit a one-ton object in roughly 100 days, a scale that targets the largest collision risks that could trigger a Kessler-style chain reaction.
There’s work ahead, from standoff distance control to propellant budgets for long burns. But the core result, peer-reviewed in Scientific Reports on August 20, 2025, shows a path to contact-free debris removal that is stable, scalable, and built from known physics rather than wishful thinking.
Plasma is a charged gas, so directing it at debris can bleed off speed until the object dips into the atmosphere and burns up. The catch has always been Newton’s third law, the same push that slows the junk kicks the remover backward. This engine solves that by balancing thrust in real time, keeping the chaser parked on target instead of drifting off.
The team also added a “cusp” magnetic field, a configuration borrowed from fusion research, to corral and focus the plasma. In vacuum-chamber tests, that tweak boosted performance, tripling the deceleration reported in earlier experiments and delivering measured pushes in the tens of millinewtons at kilowatt-class power. Researchers note that this could make future debris-cleaning missions far more efficient, extending operational lifetimes and allowing smaller spacecraft to take on bigger jobs.
Practical perks matter in orbit, and this design runs on argon, which is cheaper and easier to source than xenon common in ion engines. At projected levels, about 30 millinewtons of sustained braking could deorbit a one-ton object in roughly 100 days, a scale that targets the largest collision risks that could trigger a Kessler-style chain reaction.
There’s work ahead, from standoff distance control to propellant budgets for long burns. But the core result, peer-reviewed in Scientific Reports on August 20, 2025, shows a path to contact-free debris removal that is stable, scalable, and built from known physics rather than wishful thinking.
A Japanese team just took a sharp step toward cleaning Earth’s crowded orbit without ever touching the trash. At Tohoku University, researchers demonstrated a bi-directional plasma thruster that fires two opposed jets of ionized gas, one to slow a target hulk and the other to cancel the recoil that would shove the cleanup craft away.
Plasma is a charged gas, so directing it at debris can bleed off speed until the object dips into the atmosphere and burns up. The catch has always been Newton’s third law, the same push that slows the junk kicks the remover backward. This engine solves that by balancing thrust in real time, keeping the chaser parked on target instead of drifting off.
The team also added a “cusp” magnetic field, a configuration borrowed from fusion research, to corral and focus the plasma. In vacuum-chamber tests, that tweak boosted performance, tripling the deceleration reported in earlier experiments and delivering measured pushes in the tens of millinewtons at kilowatt-class power. Researchers note that this could make future debris-cleaning missions far more efficient, extending operational lifetimes and allowing smaller spacecraft to take on bigger jobs.
Practical perks matter in orbit, and this design runs on argon, which is cheaper and easier to source than xenon common in ion engines. At projected levels, about 30 millinewtons of sustained braking could deorbit a one-ton object in roughly 100 days, a scale that targets the largest collision risks that could trigger a Kessler-style chain reaction.
There’s work ahead, from standoff distance control to propellant budgets for long burns. But the core result, peer-reviewed in Scientific Reports on August 20, 2025, shows a path to contact-free debris removal that is stable, scalable, and built from known physics rather than wishful thinking.
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