United Nations Meeting on Excess Space Debris – Part II
“Unfortunately we may have to wait for something to happen, perhaps a big near miss, before people realise we can’t go on as we are,” Crowther said.
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Several accidents have happened in low Earth orbit, due to the amount of 9,000 pieces and 5,500 tons of space debris floating in orbit. In 1991, a space shuttle had to carry out an emergency seven-second burn of its engines, in order to avoid being struck by floating parts of a previous satellite. And in 2006, pieces of a satellite burnt up in the atmosphere, close to a Latin American Airbus carrying 270 passengers over the Pacific. And to date, so far, one Oklahoma woman is the only person physically hurt by space junk, when she was hit in the shoulder by a piece of a Delta rocket’s fuel tank. “This is a growing environmental problem,” said Nicholas Johnson, the chief scientist and program manager for orbital debris at NASA in Houston, Texas.
In regard to the big picture, over the past few years, the U.S. Space Surveillance Network has tracked over 13,000 human-made objects that are larger than four-inches in diameter orbiting the Earth, including both operational spacecraft and debris such as derelict rocket bodies. From this number, over 40% have come from both spacecraft and rocket bodies. Space surveillance involves detecting and tracking any man-made object which orbits Earth. This can be active or inactive satellites, spy satellites, finished rocket bodies, or space debris.
Part of the United States Strategic Command also involves cataloging and identifying these same space objects—both operational and non-operational. Also, the SPACETRACK is a worldwide surveillance for space objects on the same level, while also developing systems that are used in damage assessment, command, control, and targeting with an Image Information Processing Center and Supercomputing facility at the Air Force Maui Optical Station (AMOS). And the resources and responsibility for the “HAVE STARE Radar System” development, per Congressional direction in FY93, were transferred to SPACETRACK from an intelligence program.
Alternatively, the Chinese government is producing and putting into effect a wide degree of spce debrit counter-measures in order to reduce the amount of space debris from their rockets and satellites. They also are developing a “space-surveillance tool” in order to determine exactly what is in space orbit. A member since the mid-1990s of the 11-member Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC), this is to demonstrate their seriousness about the current space debris problem, after their space destruction of a mobile ground-based Chinese missile, used to destroy with intention a retired Chinese meteorological satellite. Like the spy satellite the United States just destroyed, it created thousands of pieces of orbital debris to overload an already loaded space junk-yard.
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