SWEEP: Solar sailing towards a sustainable future in Earth orbit

‘There’s a problem brewing overhead.’ Few phrases capture the urgency of the space debris issue as effectively as this statement from the European Space Agency. Earth orbit, once an expansive and relatively empty domain, has become increasingly congested over the past decades. Today, more than 40,000 tracked objects larger than ten centimetres share orbital space with operational satellites, accompanied by hundreds of thousands of smaller fragments. These objects travel at orbital velocities of around 7 km/s, roughly 25,000 km/h, meaning that even a tiny fragment can cause catastrophic damage upon impact.