Aerospace giant Boeing has developed a novel means of clearing space junk from low Earth orbit: A cloud of ballistic gas. Most space junk-clearing schemes involve launching something up there to physically de-orbit debris, but this means launching rocket stages into orbit that then become more orbital debris. Boeing's solution: Launch a rocket full of cryogenic inert gas right to the very edge of space, then forcibly eject tons of vaporised gas further upward into an orbiting debris cluster. The initial density of the cloud will create enough drag to slow the debris just enough to de-orbit it, and the launch rocket would remain low enough to fall harmlessly back to Earth.

Aside from a couple particularly nasty collisions, dead satellites comprise the bulk of our planet's space junk problem - as they die, get fried by radiation and become zombies, or are decommissioned, there's nowhere for them to go. ViviSat aims to change that by servicing satellites where they are, pushing them into new orbits and allowing them to live longer.

The growing space junk problem in various orbits around the Earth gets plenty of ink these days, particularly when the ISS has to fire its thrusters to dodge a piece of a satellite, or when a defunct satellite smashes into a perfectly good, multimillion dollar piece of orbital communications hardware. Gathering up and disposing or all that fast-moving refuse makes for a difficult problem, but over at EPFL in Switzerland a team of researchers is developing a new kind of micro-sat that could help clean up low Earth orbit, starting by disposing of Switzerland's own leftover space debris.

Our growing space junk problem could become an orbiting spare satellite parts sale if DARPA has its way. The DoD's research arm has launched a new program, appropriately titled Phoenix, to create new satellites from the decommissioned and dead satellites currently sitting idle in geosynchronous orbit some 35,000 kilometres above the Earth.

A five tonne piece of space junk is hurtling out of control towards Earth and is expected to hit the ground sometime this weekend.NASA says that the defunct Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS), which was launched in 1991 to study climate change, will make impact somewhere between 57° south latitude and 57° north latitude - basically the entire populated world.