A new $150 million Australian research centre is being set up to target space junk in Earth’s orbit.
The Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) for Space Environment Management, based at Mt Stromlo Observatory near Canberra, will bring together work by researchers and industry groups from Australia and overseas.
The centre will develop ways to track and remove more than 300,000 pieces of space debris in orbit.
CRC chief executive Dr Ben Greene says debris is a real problem for satellites and spacecraft.
“A catastrophic avalanche of collisions that would quickly destroy all satellites is now possible,” he said.
“In the worst case, two satellites would collide and the debris from those satellites would be directly in the path of more satellites in a very short space of time.
Video: Space junk a threat to satellites (ABC News)
“They would then generate more debris and very quickly the avalanche would grow until everything was colliding with everything and space would become uninhabitable for satellites for hundreds of years.”
Dr Greene says there is a “realistic threat” that, at current rates, there is a chance all satellites could be destroyed in a catastrophic event.
He says finding a way to accurately track orbiting material is the first challenge researchers will face.
“It’s a realistic threat. We are exactly on the curve that we predicted 10 years ago for the number of satellites we would lose in a year,” he said.
“If those losses are at a level two or three times , we could avalanche effect where we lose everything.”
The CRC will use high-powered telescopes to identify space debris. It will then bounce specialised lasers off the objects to identify their range and plot their orbits.
“Our initial aim is to reduce the rate of debris proliferation due to new collisions,” Dr Greene said.
“There is now so much debris that it is colliding with itself, making an already big problem even bigger.”
Collisions between satellites, space debris ‘regular’
CRC lead researcher Professor Craig Smith says collisions between satellites and space debris are not unusual.
“We’ve managed to pollute space kind of like the way we’ve polluted oceans and rivers. It’s an environmental problem,” he said.
“There are actually regular collisions – one to two a year between active space satellites and more collisions between space debris.
“At the moment, they are random acts of God because no-one can do anything about them.
“Part of the CRC’s plan is to predict and to manoeuvre satellites around the space debris and ultimately to push space debris to stop collisions happening.”
Dr Greene says the CRC currently tracks 10 per cent of known space debris and hopes to cover 50 per cent within the next five years.
“We’re trying to look after some serious assets and we’re trying to take care of a problem that until quite recently was considered unmanageable,” he said.
There are more than 6,000 active satellites in orbital space worth an estimated $1 trillion.
further talk of huge lasers.. no mention of sharks