CHAMPAIGN — Devin Bergman isn't expecting NASA to call, or for the nation's leading scientists to come asking for help.

But if that ever happens, the fifth-year senior at the University of Illinois would be able to provide some practical ideas to solve an ongoing problem: how to remove the space junk cluttering the Earth's upper atmosphere.

Bergman, a 2007 Paxton-Buckley-Loda High graduate, was among a group of six aerospace engineering students at the university who recently won a national competition sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The competition involved designing a spacecraft that could safely remove the dead satellites and other man-made debris orbiting the Earth's upper atmosphere.

The yearlong project was the focus of Bergman's senior aerospace engineering design class. Professor Soon-Jo Chung split up the 36-student class into six groups. Bergman's group, which named itself Sayonara Space Systems, designed a spacecraft named ADIOS, which stands for Agile Debris-In-Orbit Solution.

Sixteen of the spacecraft would be launched at a single time into the atmosphere, where they would attach to a piece of debris and then use on-board rockets to set the piece of debris into a safe trajectory toward Earth, Bergman said. The debris and spacecraft would then likely burn up upon entering the atmosphere, Bergman said.

NASA and other space agencies track hundreds of thousands of pieces of debris orbiting the Earth in order to avoid collisions when launching new satellites and space shuttles into orbit. A collision between two pieces of debris could result not only in the failure of the spacecraft sent into orbit, but also create hundreds of new pieces of debris.

"They've actually made simulations showing that in the next few years, if this whole debris problem isn't dealt with, then it's just going to start exponentially growing because things are hitting each other and then that creates more debris," Bergman said.

"It just gets to where you really can't go into space any more. So that's really a big problem."

Because the larger pieces of space junk have the potential to cause the most problems, Bergman and his group designed ADIOS to attach itself to large-mass debris.

Bergman's group placed second in a class-wide contest, then took first in the national one.

To Bergman's surprise, after his group was named the winner of the national competition, he read a report by a group of scientists in a space magazine that detailed a similar design for a spacecraft with the same purpose. Bergman said the report detailed "almost exactly what we had done."

Bergman's "overall job was to come up with how the ADIOS spacecraft intercepts the debris and latches onto it and propels it down back into the atmosphere. I had to come up with the trajectories and how much fuel was needed and stuff like that."

His group considered sending the debris away, rather than toward, Earth, but "part of the reason we didn't do that is because the competition specified we had to do it in a controlled orbit, and if we were to put it out there (in space) the definition of 'controlled' would not be provided," he said. "It would be feasible (to send the debris elsewhere), but I think it would take a lot more fuel to do that, which requires a lot more money. So this is probably much better, actually."

Other members of the Sayonara Space Systems group included Christopher Habib, Jason Hewkin, Coralie Jackman, Phil Hornstein and Jason Goerlich, as well as two freshman interns: Nathan Dostart and Tucker Gritton.

Bergman is proud of winning the national competition, but at this point he is more focused on a future military career, and maybe running for political office, than he is on pursuing an aerospace engineering career. He said his degree, however, can be a "backup" if he gives up his other potential careers.