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Last week’s incident, when two satellites collided 500 miles above northern Siberia creating an extended cloud of debris, has forced the European Space Agency to reconsider its options, and push for the application of the a space program capable of accurately monitoring space objects, in order to prevent future collisions.
The Space Situational Awareness initiative has been first introduced in November last year, at ESA’s Ministerial Council meeting in Hague. The program is intended to support the independent capacity to secure and operate Europe’s space infrastructure.
One of the program’s missions is to survey the objects orbiting the Earth in various orbits, by detecting, tracking and imaging them.
Nicholas Bobrinsky, head of the Ground Station Systems Division at ESA, said in a statement last year that Europe is currently depending on receiving information about satellite orbits and debris from other organism, and sometimes that information is not even fully disclosed.
This means that Europe cannot effectively assess the threats to its satellites, and taking timely action to perform a debris avoidance maneuver is almost impossible.
ESA officially launched the program in January this year, and said last week’s incident shows how important monitoring is in these situations.
According to NASA’s estimations, there are over 13,000 pieces of debris orbiting the Earth, posing a serious threat to satellites. Even the smallest of object could destroy a satellite, if the space junk is not being monitored properly.
Last Tuesday, a privately held commercial communications satellite and a defunct Russian satellite bumped into each other. The satellites should have been monitored, and it still remains unclear how the collision was possible in the first place.
Leaving that aside, this incident is very rare, and the probability of a collision between two satellites is very small, specialists have said. Unfortunately, the debris left behind does represent a problem.
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