Warwick University researchers have led an international effort to uncover some of the faintest debris in geosynchronous orbit that have ever been observed, finding fragments as small as 5 cm in size and obtaining valuable data for characterising their behaviour.
“Pieces of space junk can be moving very quickly relative to one another, as much as several kilometres every second,” explained lead author, Dr James Blake, Research Fellow at Warwick’s Centre for Space Domain Awareness. “The energies involved are really high, and even small debris can cause a lot of damage to very expensive satellites, so small things really matter.”
Debris surveys for geostationary orbit (GEO) tend to target a zone shaped like a Hula Hoops crisp surrounding the main orbit, to search for drifting abandoned satellites and uncontrolled debris. The team re-examined an archival dataset from a previous survey of GEO debris, undertaken with the 2.54 m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) in La Palma, Canary Islands.
By applying newly developed algorithms for processing the images, the team were able to detect very faint targets (some of the faintest debris ever detected) and characterise their behaviour by examining light curves, finding many to be tumbling through space.
Accounting for the new detections, nearly 80 percent of the faint objects found in this study were not previously documented (i.e. do not appear in publicly available catalogues), highlighting the need for scientifically driven surveys. The team are now looking to broaden their search, harnessing observations from other telescopes across the globe.
For more information
DebrisWatch II: Digging Deeper for Geosynchronous Debris at the Journal the Astronautical Sciences
Image: NASA via the University of Warwick