Source: bbc.com

The United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA), the world’s highest-level decision-making body on the environment works to build a healthier environment to support humanity for generations to come. In India we talk about Swachh Bharat Mission which is a country-wide campaign initiated to make country clean and green. But have we ever thought of maintenance of our space also?

Source: boldbusiness.com

Space debris also called space junk, refers to artificial material that is orbiting Earth but is no longer functional. This material can be as large as a discarded rocket stage or as small as a microscopic chip of paint. These include derelict spacecraft, non-functional spacecraft and abandoned launch vehicle stages—mission-related debris, and particularly fragmentation debris from the breakup of worn out rocket bodies and spacecraft. Much of the debris is in low Earth orbit, within 2,000 km (1,200 miles) of Earth’s surface. The amount of debris in space threatens both crewed and uncrewed spaceflight.

Source: Wikipedia
Saudi officials inspect a crashed PAM-D module in January 2001


Worst space-debris events happened 

Space debris began to accumulate in Earth orbit immediately with the first launch of an artificial satellite into orbit in 1957. After the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) began compiling a database (the Space Object Catalog) of all known rocket launches and objects reaching orbit. On July 24, 1996, the first collision between an operational satellite and a piece of space debris took place when a fragment from the upper stage of a European Ariane rocket collided with Cerise, a French microsatellite. Cerise was damaged but continued to function. The first collision that destroyed an operational satellite happened on February 10, 2009, when Iridium 33, a communication satellite owned by the American company Motorola, collided with Cosmos 2251, an inactive Russian military communications satellite, about 760 km (470 miles) above northern Siberia, shattering both satellites. The worst space-debris event happened on January 11, 2007, when the Chinese military destroyed the Fengyun-1C weather satellite in a test of an anti-satellite system, creating more than 3,000 fragments.


Before the rise of the Space Age in 1957, the only things we had to worry about falling from space were meteors, asteroids and the occasional comet. But today, satellites and spacecraft regularly launch into orbit and beyond, and sometimes they fall back to Earth. Some of these major events include Europe's GOCE Satellite, Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS),  Skylab space station , Pegasus 2 satellite, Salyut 7-Cosmos 1686 complex, NASA's space shuttle Columbia, China’s Long March 7 rocket  and many more.

Major steps taken to highlight and solve this problem

Source: Mashable SEA
Japan's idea of wooden satellite

There are many steps which are being taken by various organisations and countries to solve this problem. A Japanese company and Kyoto University are planning to develop wooden satellites to shoot into orbit by 2023 to get rid of space junk. Takao Doi, a professor at Kyoto University and Japanese astronaut said that the next stage will be developing the engineering model of the satellite, and then we will manufacture the flight model.”

Skyrora , the Scottish rocket company said that its orbit transfer vehicle, part of its Skyrora XL rocket, could clear debris, reposition satellites and remove redundant satellites from orbit. Tackling the issue of space junk, the “reignitable” Skyrora XL rocket is due to launch in 2023. Founded by Anirudh Sharma & Rahul Rawat , SpaceTech startup Digantara Research and Technologies Pvt Ltd (Digantara) is India’s first air and space surveillance company which has developed India’s first In-orbit Space Debris Monitoring and tracking system, which is based on LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology. Digantara has been incubated by SID (Society for Innovation and Development) at Indian Institute of Science, (IISc). The start-up has received a grant of Rs 25 lakhs which will be used to develop space debris monitoring systems and the company’s expansion. Researchers from China’s Tianjin University has also developed such a robotic arm that can be used to chase down and collect debris from satellites and other space technology orbiting high above Earth. The robotic arm, which resembles the arm of an octopus or the trunk of an elephant, includes a central backbone made up of a super elastic metal alloy of nickel and titanium, which can revert naturally back to its original shape after being bent or deformed by outside forces. 

So it is the need of hour to minimise this major risk of space debris. Students, researchers and scientists worldwide should work together to find more feasible solutions to this problem so that this doesn’t pose any problem in future satellite launches and space development.