I didn't mean gently coalescing, I specifically meant smashing into each other in an inelastic collision to shed significant amounts of orbital energy and deorbit. There'd be bits flying off but overall there's now significantly less space junk in orbit and those bits might be picked up by future magnetic junk satellites floating by.
Also with the magnetic arm, I outlined above why a magnetic arm might be better than a gripping arm. Maybe the magnetic satellites could just be giant wide rotating + signs in orbit (with the arms extending vertically). They could tessellate the sky at multiple orbit levels and could slowly use fuel to gradually shift their orbits to get even more coverage.If magnetism's inverse cube law is a concern we could also just try heavily charging the junk-collector satellite's arms once it's in orbit.
Also the point is it won't necessarily need to be in contact and it won't be combating gravity. In fact if the junk-collector is in a lower orbit it'd be in tune with gravity. If it gets it to drift down even some small amount that's progress; also since I imagine the junk collector would be in front of and behind the junk for roughly equal amounts of time, then the tangential momentum change would probably be rather small, even despite orbital speed difference between the two bodies.
I understand a big problem is just the large distances between objects, and that this method is more useful for high density Kesslery situations like you mentioned, but I'm expecting there to be more and more satellites launched in coming years and hopefully statistically over time these rare occurrences could add up to some meaningful cleanup.
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