Since the beginning of man kind’s mission into space, we’ve been sending all kinds of things into orbit around our planet. Dead satellites and other miscellaneous space debris are hovering around us over-head, and scientists are looking to clean house. Lots of ideas have been thrown around including nets, lassos and even ballistic gas clouds. The most recent idea comes from an international team of researchers lead by Japan’s Riken research institute. They want to blast about 3,000 tons of space junk out of the sky with a fiber optic laser mounted on the International Space Station.

Their plan is straight-forward, as reported by Engadget. The research team first wants to adapt the EUSO’s (Extreme Universe Space Observatory) infrared telescope to track chunks of space debris hurtling around the globe at very high speeds. Then they propose using a fiber optic CAN laser, formerly used in powering particle accelerators, to shoot at and hit the objects until they fall out of orbit and burn up during reentry. The researchers estimate that the combined system could effectively hunt particles as small as a centimeter in diameter.

The Riken team recently published its plan in the journal Acta Astronautica and hopes to conduct a trial run of their idea. They will install a small, proof-of-concept system aboard the ISS using a 20 cm telescope and 100 strand laser. “If that goes well,” Riken team leader Toshikazu Ebisuzaki said in a statement, “we plan to install a full-scale version on the ISS, incorporating a three-meter telescope and a laser with 10,000 fibers, giving it the ability to deorbit debris with a range of approximately 100 kilometers. Looking further to the future, we could create a free-flyer mission and put it into a polar orbit at an altitude near 800 kilometers, where the greatest concentration of debris is found.”