(NASA, 2020)
Risk Item 1: Orbital debris – Kinetic Risks:
•any man-made object in orbit about which no longer serves a useful function.
•includes non-functional spacecraft, mission-related debris and fragments.
•space debris increases the potential danger to all space vehicles, e.g. the International Space Station, space shuttles and human-carrying spacecraft.
•NASA has a set of guidelines to assess the threat of approaching orbital debris
•evasive action or precautions taken to ensure the safety of the crew.
•Debris avoidance manoeuvers are planned when the probability of collision from a conjunction reaches limits set in the space shuttle and space station flight rules.
•> 20,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball orbiting the Earth at 17,500 mph
• 500,000 pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger.
•many millions of pieces of debris that are so small they can’t be tracked.
•On Feb. 10, 2009, a defunct Russian satellite collided with and destroyed a functioning U.S. Iridium commercial satellite. The collision added more than 2,000 pieces of trackable debris to the inventory of space junk.
•China's 2007 anti-satellite test, added more than 3,000 pieces to the debris problem (NASA, 2018)
•Indian 740kg spacecraft Microsat-R launched in January 2019 in low orbit, was intentionally destroyed in a test of a ground-based, direct-ascent Anti-Satellite weapon system in March 2019. 49 fragments remain on-orbit as of July 2019 (Anz-Meador, 2019).
CURRENT PRACTICE:
•The best post-mission plan from an orbital debris mitigation standpoint removes the spacecraft from orbit
•atmospheric re-entry, whether targeted or through gradual orbital decay, is often an inexpensive and effective means to do this.
•accurate modelling of the thermal demise of the spacecraft is required for assessing the casualty risk to people on the ground due to randomly falling debris from spacecraft being disposed (Greene et al, 2019).
ISSUE:
The space industry considers the demise of a space object as the end of the debris problem, but this attitude ignores the resultant gaseous and particulate potential contamination of earth’s atmosphere as the debris combusts and vaporizes. This potential contamination requires investigation (as Risk Item 10).
•any man-made object in orbit about which no longer serves a useful function.
•includes non-functional spacecraft, mission-related debris and fragments.
•space debris increases the potential danger to all space vehicles, e.g. the International Space Station, space shuttles and human-carrying spacecraft.
•NASA has a set of guidelines to assess the threat of approaching orbital debris
•evasive action or precautions taken to ensure the safety of the crew.
•Debris avoidance manoeuvers are planned when the probability of collision from a conjunction reaches limits set in the space shuttle and space station flight rules.
•> 20,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball orbiting the Earth at 17,500 mph
• 500,000 pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger.
•many millions of pieces of debris that are so small they can’t be tracked.
•On Feb. 10, 2009, a defunct Russian satellite collided with and destroyed a functioning U.S. Iridium commercial satellite. The collision added more than 2,000 pieces of trackable debris to the inventory of space junk.
•China's 2007 anti-satellite test, added more than 3,000 pieces to the debris problem (NASA, 2018)
•Indian 740kg spacecraft Microsat-R launched in January 2019 in low orbit, was intentionally destroyed in a test of a ground-based, direct-ascent Anti-Satellite weapon system in March 2019. 49 fragments remain on-orbit as of July 2019 (Anz-Meador, 2019).
CURRENT PRACTICE:
•The best post-mission plan from an orbital debris mitigation standpoint removes the spacecraft from orbit
•atmospheric re-entry, whether targeted or through gradual orbital decay, is often an inexpensive and effective means to do this.
•accurate modelling of the thermal demise of the spacecraft is required for assessing the casualty risk to people on the ground due to randomly falling debris from spacecraft being disposed (Greene et al, 2019).
ISSUE:
The space industry considers the demise of a space object as the end of the debris problem, but this attitude ignores the resultant gaseous and particulate potential contamination of earth’s atmosphere as the debris combusts and vaporizes. This potential contamination requires investigation (as Risk Item 10).