That Chinese anti-satellite test was pretty bad/unfriendly/unneighborly. I don't usually complain about China, but I do hold this against them, especially considering the follow-on avalanche issue. Nature reports:
The threat of space junk has reached a tipping point, and NASA’s programmes to evaluate those risks are underfunded and understaffed, says a National Academies report released today.
The panel, tasked with evaluating NASA’s orbital debris programme at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, notes that the problem of orbital debris -- which, whether natural or man-made, can rip apart spacecraft -- may have reached a critical point. In 2007, China used an anti-satellite missile to blow up a weather satellite, creating about 150,000 particles larger than one centimeter. Two years later, an accidental collision between two satellites added to the mess. Taken together, the two events more than doubled the amount of fragmentation debris in Earth orbit (see chart). There are now more than 16,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters in the public catalog of tracked objects -- and there are modeling scenarios in which this number will now increase on its own accord, as existing space junk is pulverized into ever more particles in a runaway, snowballing process.
The National Academies panel says that budget, management structure and personnel for the orbital debris office have not kept pace with its responsibilities, and the panel recommends that the office develop a strategic plan that would address gaps in research. Moreover, the panel advises NASA to develop a database of spacecraft anomalies that are probably due to particles too small to be tracked, and that this data could be used to upgrade models that estimate impact risks.
But the panel also wants the office to begin thinking about ways to clean up the mess -- and envisions a day when that task could be as important as any other major NASA programme. According to the panel, NASA should, alongside the US State Department, begin to evaluate the legal framework through which it could go about collecting, moving or destroying space junk. The United States is responsible for roughly 30% of the objects in orbit. Any NASA clean-up would be limited to just those items, since current legal principles restrict nations to salvaging only their own objects.
