It’s getting crowded up there. An increase in military, commercial and scientific launches, coupled with a lower cost for rideshare cubesat launches, means lots more space junk to deal with in coming years. And we’re not just talking about low Earth orbit; the moon and cis-lunar (near lunar space) is about to become busy as well.
It’s getting crowded up there. An increase in military, commercial and scientific launches, coupled with a lower cost for rideshare cubesat launches, means lots more space junk to deal with in coming years. And we’re not just talking about low Earth orbit; the moon and cis-lunar (near lunar space) is about to become busy as well.
While we track and understand (for the most part) what’s in low Earth orbit (LEO), we often fail to keep tabs on what’s in Medium- to High- (Geostationary/Geosynchronous GEO) orbit and beyond. Even less so is true around the moon, which is about to become a busy place in coming years. Now, a recent study out of Purdue University is looking to model and track space debris around the moon, with an eye towards mitigation.
The study, led by Carolin Frueh, would give tracking assets prime areas and regions in the sky near the moon to perform such a mission. The study also points to using „four-body geometry“ to model the evolution of orbits over time.
Debris tracking and avoidance is already a frequent problem for the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit. This is an issue that future lunar missions will also have to come to terms with.
„Currently, there are not that many missions into that (cis-lunar) space yet,“ Carolin Frueh (Purdue University) told Universe Today. „From that perspective, we ‚know what is going on,‘ but as we do not have established surveillance in that region (yet), we are lacking a lot of information, especially in terms of deep-space objects coming into that region and in terms of debris objects.“
Recent events highlight just how busy things are already getting around the moon.
