GS-3: Science and Technology- developments and their applications and effects in everyday life.
Space Junk Threat
Context: In March, a Chinese military satellite (Yunhai 1-02) appeared to spontaneously disintegrate in orbit, leaving a trail of debris high above the Earth.
Recently it was understood that the satellite disintegrated due to its collision with a piece of junk leftover from a 1996 Russian rocket launch.
It was the first major smash-up in Earth orbit since 2009.
What is Space Junk?
It is the dead and unwanted craft left behind in the finite space of Earth orbit.
More than 100 million pieces of space junk are now orbiting the Earth.
Although the vast majority are the size of sand grains or smaller, at least 26,000 hunks are big enough to destroy a satellite.
What is the major concern with Space Junk?
Due to cost-saving advances in rocket and satellite technologies, more countries and companies are preparing to launch more stuff into orbit than ever before.
About 4,000 operational satellites are now in orbit; in the years ahead, that number could rise to more than 100,000.
As more entities seek to access orbit for scientific and commercial purposes, the likelihood and risk of a collision is growing fast.
Each collision would in turn produce debris that made further collisions more likely.
The result could be a belt of space junk so dense that it would make certain low-Earth orbits unusable.
Space junk could also affect their research operations (including the threat posed to astronauts aboard the International Space Station).
As Earth orbit becomes an increasingly important arena for military rivalry, there’s also the risk that collisions could be misinterpreted as something other than an accident.
Understanding the criticality of the issue, NASA set up an Orbital Debris Program Office (ODPO) to deal with the problem.
What was the outcome of ODPO?
In 1995, the agency issued the world’s first set of debris-mitigation guidelines. Among other things, it proposed that satellites be designed to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere within 25 years of mission completion.
Other spacefaring countries and the United Nations followed with their own guidelines.
But urgency and compliance were lacking, partly because the world had not yet experienced a destructive collision between spacecraft and debris until 2007.
In 2007, China launched a ballistic missile at one of its old weather satellites, producing the largest cloud of space debris ever tracked.
Later in 2009, a non-functional Russian communications orbiter collided with a functioning one operated by Iridium Satellite, producing almost 2,000 pieces of debris measuring at least 4 inches in diameter.
Since then, the situation has only gotten more precarious
So what can be done?
Collaboration between nations to tackle the issue of space junk, is required.
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, negotiated during an earlier space race with little input from China, needs to be updated.
In particular, provisions that grant countries permanent property rights to their objects in space may complicate efforts to clean up debris.
Next, Nasa should fund research into debris-removal technologies—such as those recently demonstrated by Astroscale, a Japanese startup, which hold promise— and consider partnerships with companies developing them.
The US should also seek to expand the Artemis Accords, a framework for space cooperation that includes (so far) 11 other countries.
As more nations join, debris-mitigation protocols, such as a requirement to specify which country has responsibility for end-of-mission planning, should become routine.
Conclusion
Nations should help to make space a place where countries and companies collaborate, not collide.
