Darren McKnight, Centauri; Timothy Maclay, OneWeb
Keywords: Space Safety, Orbital Debris, Debris Mitigation, Debris Remediation
Abstract:
The primary risk to assured operations in space is the lethal nontrackable (LNT) debris population. This is the component of the orbital debris environment that is too small to see and avoid, but large enough for a collision to compromise a satellites mission. Current space safety discussions, however, are largely dominated by concern over the trackable population, a component that represents only a very small fraction of a satellites mission-terminating collisional risk profile.
While necessary for assured space operations, the disproportionate focus on space traffic management (STM, dealing with data sharing and collision avoidance, CA), space situational awareness (SSA, providing information on orbiting objects), and debris mitigation leads to in debris remediation being largely ignored. The lack of emphasis on debris remediation is largely due to an unclear value proposition for it in the past and the fact that there is no organization that has the charter to deal with this issue going forward.
The authors propose establishing a new initiative called space environment management (SEM). SEM includes debris mitigation and debris remediation.
It is hoped that this paper will help to motivate countries and companies to actively pursue efforts in SEM parallel with current STM activities in both level of effort and assignment of responsibilities for execution.
Date of Conference: September 17-20, 2019
Track: Orbital Debris