Space Debris: UK Technology Scans The Skies

UK space surveillance technology is being used in ESA's first co-ordinated space tracking campaign - part of a larger programme to provide up to date and accurate information on space hazards in Earth's orbit. These hazards stem from possible collisions between objects in orbit, harmful space weather and potential strikes by natural objects that cross Earth's orbit.

UK involvement in the tracking campaign is through the UK Space Agency and includes Space Insight's Starbrook - an innovative optical sensor system for space surveillance, and the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Chilbolton Observatory - one of the world's most advanced meteorological radar experimental facilities.

Organised as part of ESA's Space Situational Awareness preparatory programme, the campaign is designed to test the utility of existing telescopes and radars to observe objects in Earth orbit. As well as evaluating each of the individual sensors, it will check out interoperability issues and will provide input to the design of future ESA space surveillance capabilities.

Professor Richard Crowther, a space debris expert from the UK Space Agency, said: "Space surveillance projects like this one are vital in this age of growing space technology. With more than 20 000 tracked objects including around 1000 operational satellites orbiting the Earth, we need to be aware of potential collisions.

At closing speeds reaching 50 thousand km per hour, even the smallest bits of space debris can cause serious harm to spacecraft. This damage can have a massive impact on our lives, as we increasingly rely on space-based activity to provide us with many modern services."

The UK signed up to ESA's Space Situational Awareness (SSA) programme at the 2008 Ministerial Council meeting. The programme is designed to provide a European source of information on space hazards and a satellite close-approach warning service - an important tool in the prevention of collisions and the resultant creation of more space debris. The dangers of such collisions have already been demonstrated by the Iridium / Cosmos collision in 2009.

The data from Starbrook and STFC's Chilbolton Observatory is being used to refine orbital models, enabling more accurate predictions of a space object's future position. This has applications in the area of satellite collision avoidance and conjunction analysis which involves the prediction and post-event analysis of close approaches, or, in the worst case, collisions between two space objects.

The Starbrook optical sensor is a ground-based wide field of view surveying sensor, designed by Space Insight Ltd to make feasible the task of observing the increasingly large number of objects in the higher Earth orbits, such as the geostationary and GPS-type orbits. It detects objects as small as 1m in size at up to 40,000km from Earth.

UK Technology Scans The Skies For Space Hazards