ESA teams respond to debris risk

For the past few days, experts from ESA's Space Debris Office at ESOC in Darmstadt, Germany, have been assessing a conjunction (read: collision) forecast issued by the US armed forces’ Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) located at Vandenberg Air Force base in California. JSpOC receive data from the American space tracking radars and telescopes, among other sources, and through a long-standing data-sharing agreement, alert ESA whenever a conjunction involving one of our missions appears possible. Space debris are now one of the principle threats to orbiting satellites. We estimate that an ever-increasing cloud of more than 750 000 dangerous debris objects larger than 1 cm are in Earth orbit with the potential to damage or destroy intact satellites, creating yet more fragments. More

(Source: ESA - Jan 26)