Since 2012, engineers at EPFL’s Space Center have been hard at work on a new junk-clearing satellite to capture debris orbiting the earth. The team has now shifted up a gear, founding a company called ClearSpace to pick up where the CleanSpace One project leaves off. For the first test mission, penciled in for 2024, the company has set its sights on capturing and destroying SwissCube, a nanosatellite developed by students from EPFL and other Swiss universities and launched on 23 September 2009. Looking further ahead, the startup plans to develop a viable, cost-efficient system for cleaning up the estimated 3,000-or-so derelict satellites orbiting closest to earth.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-04-startup-space.html