SPACE DEBRIS

April 3, 2019

US space agency NASA has criticized India’s first anti-satellite missile test last week by arguing that the debris created by the test had increased the risk to the International Space Station (ISS).

About:

Space debris encompasses both natural (meteoroid) and artificial (man-made) particles.
Artificial debris (also referred as orbital debris) includes non-functional spacecraft, abandoned launch vehicle stages, mission-related debris and fragmentation debris
Status of Orbital Debris: According to ESA’s Space Debris Office, in almost 60 years of space activities, more than 5200 launches have placed some 7500 satellites into orbit, of which about 4300 remain in space; only a small fraction − about 1200 − are still operational today (data as on January 2017).
Space junk will further increase due to –
- Launching of CubeSats (inexpensive, tiny satellites) are going to add space junk in coming years,
- Entry of private players like SpaceX in the space domain and
- Kessler syndrome.
Threat due to Space debris: These pieces move at very great speeds, thus a collision with any other satellite in space could render that satellite dysfunctional, if not destroy it.
Debris Avoidance Manoeuvres (DAMs): If an object is assessed to have the potential to hit International Space Station (ISS), then ISS navigates away from its normal trajectory which is called as DAMs.