How dried passion fruit inspired a Chinese device that might help clean up space junk

Silicone ball forms deep wrinkles that can ‘grab’ nearby items, from diamonds and glass to blueberries and soybeans

Invention could be used to retrieve hazardous materials, hard-to-reach objects and debris that could harm spacecraft, researchers say

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Chinese researchers tested their fruit-inspired invention by grabbing a variety of items. Photo: Handout

Published: 11:00pm, 24 Oct 2022Updated: 2:48am, 25 Oct 2022

A box of withered passion fruit inspired Chinese scientists to invent a device they say could be used to clean up space debris and hazardous materials.

The researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai and Tsinghua University in Beijing developed a soft silicone ball with a bumpy texture resembling the wrinkled skin of the dried fruit.

The deep wrinkles on the device’s surface can grasp a variety of objects – from diamonds to blueberries – and could even be used to clean up tiny particles of space junk floating in orbit, according to the scientists, whose findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Computational Science on Monday.

The scientists got their idea from passion fruit that were left at the office. Photo: Feng Xiqiao, Xu Fan

Xu Fan, a professor with the department of aeronautics and astronautics at Fudan University, said the simple and agile device could be made in sizes ranging from millimetres to metres and be deployed in places people could not reach.

“A robotic arm equipped with the sphere grasper could collect small space debris with high precision,” Xu said. “On Earth, it could pick up dangerous particles such as explosives.”

According to Nasa, there are about half a million marble-sized pieces of debris stuck in the Earth’s orbit, while another 100 million pieces as small as a pencil tip are circling the planet. Even the smallest pieces of debris, such as paint flecks from rockets, can damage spacecraft as they collide at extremely high speeds in low-Earth orbit.

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The idea started with a box of fruit that was left at the office. Xu’s colleague at Tsinghua called to say he saw some interesting patterns taking shape in the withering produce, so the scientists started dehydrating passion fruit to observe them.

How dried passion fruit inspired a Chinese device that might help clean up space junk

Silicone ball forms deep wrinkles that can ‘grab’ nearby items, from diamonds and glass to blueberries and soybeans Invention could be used to retrieve hazardous materials, hard-to-reach objects and debris that could harm spacecraft, researchers say

Silicone ball forms deep wrinkles that can ‘grab’ nearby items, from diamonds and glass to blueberries and soybeans

Invention could be used to retrieve hazardous materials, hard-to-reach objects and debris that could harm spacecraft, researchers say