Glorfield reported in late October, 2021 that in Neal Stephenson’s 2015 novel Seveneves, he imagines that the Earth’s Moon breaking into seven pieces. This being a work of science fiction, the event of course has dire consequences for everyone on the planet. But if the idea of a cloud of space debris left over from the shattering of the Moon seems fanciful, think again. As of 26 May 2021, according to NASA, there are about 23,000 pieces of debris “larger than a softball” (greater than 10cm) orbiting the Earth, travelling at speeds over 28,000km/h – “fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft”.
But wait, there’s more – lots more. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and all those prospective space tourists (hello, William Shatner) should know that NASA estimates there are half a million pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger (up to one cm), and approximately 100 million pieces of debris about one mm and larger. There is even more micrometer-sized debris. Of that, only 27,000 pieces of orbital debris, otherwise known as “space junk”, are being tracked by the US Department of Defense’s global Space Surveillance Network.
NASA established the Orbital Debris Program Office in 1979 at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, to track the orbital debris environment “to support risk assessments for all NASA projects and programs” and to “evaluate risk of human casualties from satellite re-entries”. The office came about largely as the result of a 1978 paper by American astrophysicist Donald Kessler, “Collision frequency of artificial satellites: The creation of a debris belt”, in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.
The paper also gave rise to a phenomenon called “the Kessler Syndrome”, which Kessler described in a 2009 article as “an orbital debris term that has become popular outside the professional orbital debris community without ever having a strict definition”. Kessler says he believes the term originated with a colleague, John Gabbard, who worked for North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which “maintained a catalogue of man-made objects in orbit, but did not maintain a breakup record of events in orbit”.
Retired astrophysicist and former NASA scientist Donald Kessler seen attending the European Conference on Space Debris at ESA in Darmstadt, Germany, on 18 April 2017. He says Gabbard may have come up with the name in an interview with Popular Science magazine. “The label stuck, becoming part of the storyline in some science fiction, and a three-word summary describing orbital debris issues.”
Kessler’s 1978 paper predicted that around the year 2000 the population of catalogued debris in orbit around the Earth would become “so dense that catalogued objects would begin breaking up as a result of random collisions with other catalogued objects and become an important source of future debris”. He gave three reasons for concern:
First, he said, “it was generally assumed that there were very few objects in orbit that were too small to catalogue, although there was no definition as to what limiting size was in the catalogue. The paper illustrated that even if this assumption were correct, future collisions between catalogued objects would produce a large amount of small debris fragments. This small debris population would be more hazardous to other spacecraft than the natural meteoroid environment immediately after the first collision.”
Second, he said each collision would also produce several hundred objects large enough to catalogue, increasing the rate that future collision breakups would occur – “resulting in an exponential growth in the collision rate and debris population”.
Third, he said, “The only way to prevent this exponential growth was to reduce the number of rocket bodies and non-operational spacecraft left in orbit after their useful lifetime.”
Gabbard unofficially kept a record of major satellite breakup events, which later proved very useful in understanding the sources of smaller orbital debris. “John is known for his description of these events with a graph we now call a ‘Gabbard Plot’,” Kessler says.
Donald Kessler was born in 1940 and grew up in Texas. In 1962 he went to work for NASA at the Johnson Space Centre; three years later he earned a bachelor of science degree with honors in physics from the University of Houston. In 1990, as NASA’s senior scientist for orbital debris research, he co-ordinated the agency’s orbital debris research program. Although he retired in 1996, the 81-year-old continues to advise various organizations and individuals on orbital debris issues. It’s work worth doing, as NASA says that “even tiny paint flecks can damage a spacecraft when travelling at these velocities”.
“A number of space shuttle windows were replaced because of damage caused by material that was analyzed and shown to be paint flecks. In fact, millimeter-sized orbital debris represents the highest mission-ending risk to most robotic spacecraft operating in low-Earth orbit,” NASA says. In 1996, NASA reported that a French satellite was hit and damaged by debris from a French rocket that had exploded a decade earlier. And on 10 February 2009, a defunct Russian satellite collided with and destroyed a functioning US communications satellite.
The BBC recently reported an incident that occurred in March 2021 in which a Chinese military satellite, the Yunhai 1-02, launched in September 2019, was crippled after colliding with “a small piece of space junk – probably a piece of debris between 10-50cm wide – from the Zenit-2 rocket that launched the Russian spy satellite Tselina-2 in September 1996”.
Originally published by Cosmos as The Kessler syndrome
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