Earth Now Has a Ring
If you’re Sci-Fi fan, you’ve undoubtedly seen more than one movie depicting a habitable planet bearing a striking resemblance to Saturn; the main character looking up to see a large, color set of ring spanning from horizon to horizon. And if you were tempted to scoff at the prospect as being no more than an artifact of a fertile imagination, think again. Though the natural ring systems found in our solar system are observed exclusively around gas giant planets — planets with no solid surface on which to land and a crushing gravitational field — Earth does nonetheless have its own ring system. It’s a artificial ring composed entirely of thousands of satellites, both operational and dead, spent rocket bodies plus many more thousands of space hardware fragments that are the products of accidental collisions with one another, secondary collisions of fragments with fragments and even the intentional shooting down of the Fan Yun 1C spacecraft by China as part of an anti-satellite weapon test in 2007. That one event drastically increased the number of pieces of space junk and made much of low earth orbit a much more dangerous place, the impact of which (pun intended) is felt so much more so now that we have people there aboard the International Space Station, tending the orbital laboratory 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Two nights ago such a piece of debris came uncomfortably close to the space station… again. It’s not the first time, and will certainly not be the last. The event underscores the need for a plan to be put in place to 1) stop placing more junk into orbit and 2) begin to remove that which is already there. The US is in the position to lead the charge, but so far there’s been nothing more than talk while one orbit after another fills up with junk at an exponential rate.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be quite so bad if Earth’s ring could at least treat us to the same color display as Saturn with it’s shimmering reds, greens and blues wrapping around the planet’s equator, but it is not to be. What we have is a belt of hypervelocity junk, which represents an increasing menace to space navigation, itself set to increase as commercial, human space flight begins to come into its own.
There are things the government can do right now to help alleviate some of the threat. As it stands, US policy for retiring a spent weather satellite in the geosynchronous orbit is not to return it to earth once its life is over as it should be but to simply boost it into a higher — so-called super-synchronous — orbit and turn it off. This strategy continues to add to the population of junk; it cannot and should not be maintained in the future. It must change and the sooner, the better.
Even this strategy is not adhered to by all spacecraft operators. SpaceNews reports that, “In 2008 and 2009 alone, four geostationary orbiting satellites — the U.S. EchoStar 2 and the Russian Gorizont 33, Raduga 1-5, Cosmos 2371 and Cosmos 2379 — were all left to expire on the geostationary arc without performing end-of-mission orbit-raising maneuvers. EchoStar 2 failed suddenly in orbit and could not be moved.” Then, of course, there is the occasional errant spacecraft like Galaxy 15, which recently ceased responding to commands from the ground and is now plowing uncontrolled through geosynchronous orbit.
The White House has issued orders to NASA and the DOD to begin researching techniques for the mitigation and removal of space debris, but this could take many years before an effective, affordable strategy of space junk removal is put in force. There are thousands of pieces of junk, and to physically remove each one could cost many millions of dollars per piece. Then again, one can easily see the potential for jobs creation in the endeavor.
In the meantime, policy must change. We must adopt strict rules to prevent spacecraft operators from leaving dead satellites in space. Let’s not wait until the multi-billion-dollar International Space Station is crippled or destroyed before we become proactive.
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