NASA's orbital debris program officially began in 1979. Lacking an official program designation at the time, it was initiated in the Space Sciences Branch at Johnson Space Center (JSC) as a result of research that concluded that impacts from Earth orbital debris had the potential to become a greater hazard to spacecraft than the natural meteoroid environment. At that time, there were no measurements of the debris environment for objects smaller than about 10 cm--the smallest size of an object in the catalog maintained by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). However, there was much more than sufficient mass in orbit to produce a significant debris population in the less-than-10-cm-size range. The inevitable mechanism for creating such small debris was collisions between the more massive, cataloged objects. In 1978, this mechanism was predicted to become important around the year 2000, depending on the growth in the cataloged debris population. However, other mechanisms (such as explosions in orbit) were also capable of producing a significant uncataloged population of debris, and could have already done so.
Limiting Future Collision Risk to Spacecraft: An Assessment of NASA's Meteoroid and Orbital Debris Programs
2011
178 pages
Report
No indication
English