NEWS
An Australian company, Electric Optic Systems claimed recently that it had developed a laser tracking system that will stop chunks of space debris colliding with spacecraft and satellites in the Earth’s orbit. According to the company’s CEO, Craig Smith, lasers fired from ground would locate and track debris as small as 1 cm across and help prevent collisions between them and manned spacecrafts or unmanned satellites. “We can track them to very high precision so that we can predict whether there are going to be collisions with other objects or not,” said Smith. The company has developed the technology with the help of $4 million grant from the Australian government.

VIEWS
Who could have imagined at the launch of the first manmade spacecraft Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957 or a little over three years later, the first manned spaceflight on April 12, 1961—with Yuri Gagarin blasting off from the Soviet soil riding Vostok 1 into an orbital flight— that one day space debris would pose such monumental risk not only to the orbiting satellites/spacecraft but also to the space-borne astronauts. While Electric Optic Systems Company needs to be congratulated for the laser initiative to be able to track and predict possible collisions in space, this everincreasing menace would continue to endanger both men and machines till an effective method is found to eradicate it in totality. But is it possible?

Space debris, also known as orbital debris, space junk or space waste, is a collection of objects—big and small—in orbit around earth that were created by humans but no longer serve any purpose. They consist of everything from spent rocket stages and defunct satellites to explosion and collision fragments. As the aimless orbits of these objects often overlap the trajectories of spacecraft, debris is a potential collision risk. A vast majority of the estimated tens of millions of pieces are small particles, impacts of which cause erosive damage, similar to sandblasting. Spacecraft are designed to carry a protective shield to prevent damage to their main body.

The present means for spacecraft shielding are only capable of protecting against debris with diameters below 1 cm (0.39 in). The only remaining means of protection would be to manoeuvre the spacecraft in order to avoid a collision. This, however, requires that the orbit of the respective object be precisely known. The equipment in use so far to gather such information is capable of tracking objects down to 5 cm (2.0 in) in low earth orbit (LEO) and about 50 cm (20 in) in geo-stationary earth orbit (GEO). In just over half-a-century of space exploration, mankind has not only been insensitive but even criminally negligent by willfully spattering the space with more and more debris. Take the case of the 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test (ASAT), which went ahead totally unmindful of the consequences of such an act and created 2,300 pieces of trackable debris, 35,000 pieces 1 cm or larger and 1 million pieces 1 mm or larger.

There is therefore no international treaty mandating behaviour to minimise space debris, but the United Nation’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPOUS) did publish voluntary guidelines the same year after the Chinese test. Clearly, there is a need to ban the use of military weapons in space as also establish globally accepted norms for peaceful exploitation of space.