The collision of Russia’s defunct Cosmos 2251 satellite and Iridium’s communication satellite last week left at least 2,000 pieces of hazardous debris in orbit that needs to be tracked and avoided by other spacecraft and space missions. The expanding amount of debris in space, and the growing number of countries with an interest in owning their own satellites, is raising the need and interest in an international governing body for space.
The United States Strategic Command tracks more than 18,000 pieces of space debris, but its mission is to warn manned missions and military satellite operations of these dangers. It doesn’t have the resources or mandate to protect international space from possible collisions, and is taxed already with the growing amount of craft and debris that are now in space.
This in-space collision is serving as a wake-up call to the international community that there need to be more regulations of space, with transparency about what is in orbit around our planet, and where these satellites are.
Already, this new debris field may halt the mission to repair the Hubble Telescope, because the amount of debris that is in space dramatically raise the odds that an astronaut could be hit by debris that is speeding around the Earth at 17,500 mph. Earth observation satellites and many other missions are also in jeopardy due to the growing amount of space junk.
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