We often picture earth through the iconic image of the blue marble taken by the apollo 17 crew in 1972. Fast forward 50 years and in that image we have also to include 27,000 pieces of space debris bigger than a tennis ball, an estimated 1 million pieces between 1-10 cm and an estimated 330 million pieces between 1mm and 1 cm. While we often talk about sustainability on earth, it is perhaps time to extend this discussion on sustainability into space.
Most of the conversation on sustainability is about space debris. Space debris is any piece of machinery left in orbit by humans these vary in size. While sense and avoid technologies are used for debris larger than 10mm, debris smaller than 10mm can remain undetected. However, even tiny pieces pose a risk to satellites. These can lead to performance degradation, mission loss, or complete disintegration of operational spacecraft upon collision.
Despite our best efforts, we only have estimates of the number of debris smaller than 10mm. It is important to understand exactly what is out there, for example through sensors surveying specific earth orbits. Dr Robert Camilleri and Dr Ing Kevin Theuma from the Institute of Aerospace Technologies have recently presented their paper documenting a proof of concept and showcased their prototype of such a sensor at one of the technical sessions in the 4S Symposium, Vilamoura, Portugal.
The 4S Symposium is a bi-annual conference organised by ESA which brings together professionals from all over the world and inviting them to engage in discussions about a wide variety of space topics. This year’s event was spread over 4 days and included technical sessions on mission and system analysis, earth observation, science and new technologies. The paper “A Satellite Damage Sensor for Detecting and quantifying damage from Multiple Hypervelocity Impacts” was presented in the New Technologies sessions.
The academics will now seek to implement the lessons learnt from the initial test regime on their first prototype and improve the technology further thus raising its TRL level.
