Technology Today

Space Debris:a new eye in the sky

What is a Debris?
An astronaut’s glove; bits of rockets; paint chips; dead satellites; frozen drops of radioactive coolant.

They are among the junk left behind from nearly 52 years of space exploration since Sputnik was launched, continuing a dangerous dance around Earth, imperiling hardware and humans working in space.

Most objects eventually burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, but others — like Vanguard I launched in 1958 — linger.

The U.S. Strategic Command tracks about 19,000 bits of debris, the smallest about the size of a grapefruit. There are thousands more too small to track but whose high velocity makes them potentially lethal to satellites.

Two companies with Colorado ties are nearing completion of a satellite that will allow the U.S. Air Force to keep a closer eye on the debris already being tracked.

Called the Space Based Space Surveillance Block 10, the satellite is to launch this summer from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Built by Boeing and Ball Aerospace, it will give debris-watchers a new eye-in-the-sky vantage point.

“This will be an integral tool toward understanding what’s going on in space,” said Fred Doyle, Ball’s vice president and general manager for national defense.

The satellite will orbit above the atmosphere, said Todd Citron, Boeing’s director of space superiority.

Its sensor can rotate in any direction, doubling the current ability to detect threats — whether missiles or debris, Doyle said.

Mitigation and prevention of debris have taken on renewed urgency since Feb. 10, when a defunct Russian military satellite collided with an active Iridium communications satellite about 500 miles above Siberia.

It was the first known collision of two satellites and resulted in a debris cloud of about 1,000 objects, each larger than 4 inches, and thousands of smaller ones traveling at speeds that would help them penetrate satellites.

Last month, astronauts aboard the international space station had two debris warnings. One forced the crew into the Soyuz lifeboat capsule as a 5-inch remnant from a rocket whizzed by at about 18,000 mph less than 3 miles away — a near-hit by space standards.

The prospect of increasing debris congestion has experts concerned.