Friday, October 14, 2011

Space junk reaching "tipping point," report warns

The amount of debris orbiting the Earth has reached “a tipping point” for collisions, which would in turn generate more of the debris that threatens astronauts and satellites, according to a U.S. study.

NASA needs a new strategic plan for mitigating the hazards posed by spent rocket bodies, discarded satellites and thousands of other pieces of junk flying around the planet at speeds of 28,160 km per hour, the National Research Council said in the study.

The council is one of the private, non-profit U.S. national academies that provide expert advice on scientific problems.

Orbital debris poses a threat to the approximately 1,000 operational commercial, military and civilian satellites orbiting the Earth—part of a global industry that generated $168 billion in revenues in 2010, Satellite Industry Association figures show.

The world’s first space smash-up occurred in 2009 when a working Iridium communications satellite and a non-operational Russian satellite collided 788 km over Siberia, generating thousands of new pieces of orbital debris.

The crash followed China’s destruction in 2007 of one of its defunct weather satellites, as part of a widely condemned anti-satellite missile test.

The amount of orbital debris tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network jumped from 9,949 catalogued objects in December 2006 to 16,094 in July 2011, with nearly 20 percent of the objects stemming from the destruction of the Chinese FENGYUN 1-C satellite.

The surveillance network tracks objects approximately 10 centimetres in diameter and larger.

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