GENEVA – The tidy Swiss want to clean up space.
Swiss scientists said Wednesday they plan to launch a “janitor satellite” specially designed to get rid of space 
junk, the orbiting debris that can do serious and costly damage to valuable satellites or even manned space ships.
The 10-million-franc ($10.09m) satellite called CleanSpace One — the prototype for a family of such satellites — is being built by the Swiss Space Centre at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Lausanne, or EPFL.
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Its launch would come within three to five years and its first tasks will be to grab two Swiss satellites that were launched in 2009 and 2010 but will be phased out of use, EPFL said.
The US space agency NASA says over 500,000 pieces of spent rocket stages, broken satellites and other debris are orbiting Earth. The debris travels at speeds approaching 28,000 kilometers per hour, fast enough to destroy or inflict expensive and time-draining damage on a satellite or spacecraft. Collisions, in turn, generate more fragments floating in space.
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