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.


    Access

    Access via TIB

    Check availability in my library


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Limiting Future Collision Risk to Spacecraft: An Assessment of NASA's Meteoroid and Orbital Debris Programs


    Publication date :

    2011


    Size :

    178 pages


    Type of media :

    Report


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English