FOIA: Vol. 3 Space Debris Summary Report June 1997

Vol3SpaceDebrisSummaryReport.pdf
Report on Space Surveillance, Asteroids and Comets, and Space Debris
Great Quality Scans of Report on Space Surveillance, Asteroids and Comets, and Space Debris; Volume 3 Space Debris Summary
Document date: 1997-06-01
Department: USAF Scientific Advisory Board
Author: F. R. Naka, G. H. Canavan, R. A. Clinton, O. P. Judd, A. F. Pensa
Document type: Technical Report
pages: 37


Archivist's Notes: Volume 3 of the Report on Space Surveillance, Asteroids and Comets, and Space Debris focuses on issues on launch, explosion, collision, fragmentation, decay and stability of space debris in Low Earth Orbit and possible impact on military space operations.

This Study was produced by the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (SAB).

It was requested by the Commander Air Force Space Command and approved by the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force.
It covers three topics, each of sufficient depth to be a study of its own: Space Surveillance, Asteroid and Comet Impact Warning for Earth, and Space Debris.
NASA personnel predicted in 1978 that collisional cascading would be an important source of new orbital debris, possibly before the year 2000, and, as a result, would make low Earth orbits at Space Shuttle altitudes unusable.

In 1991, NASA published an article that said these predictions were reinforced by events in 1986 and 1990.
Out of concern that the United Nations might take actions to regulate further the existing Air Force launch debris mitigation procedures, the SAB was asked to recalculate the debris phenomenon.

The SAB Committee has shown that cascading is not an issue in the coming hundred years and recommends that the Air Force continue its established launch and on orbit debris mitigation procedures.


Spent spacecraft, orbit injection rocket stages including boosters, transfer stages, and fragments are potential hazards to active manned and unmanned spacecraft, and several studies have concluded that collisions between them could produce a cascade of particles that could preclude activity in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) in 25 to 50 years.
These possibilities had generated pressure for constraints on military space operations, so the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (AF SAB) was asked to perform an independent study of technical aspects of the debris problem. Most of the technical work on space debris has been performed by the United States Space Command (USSPACECOM), the Air Force Phillips Laboratory, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

There is a proliferation of smaller-size satellites on one hand and a large, uncontrolled growth of debris, consisting of dead satellites and fragments from breakups of a variety of sizes, on the other.
As a result, there is a significant overlap of the two. Further, there is a growing national concern, driven by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) requirements for keeping track of debris down to 1 cm characteristic size for safety of manned spacecraft. Hence, the space surveillance system must maintain an orderly and accurate catalog of all objects in space to ensure that the mission is accomplished despite its evolving nature

The National Research Council in Orbital Debris (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1995), pp. 2 and 161–163, states, “The resulting debris environment is likely to be too hostile for future space use … Growth in the amount of debris threatens to make some valuable orbital regions increasingly inhospitable to space operations over the next few decades … The model predicts that … objects larger than 1 cm increasing to 250,000 in the next 50 years—not including the effects of collisions.
When the effects of collisions are factored in, the future increase to the population is more than 200,000 additional fragments.”

In summary, the recommendations are that the Air Force should:

•Assume a more active national and international role in space debris
Provide substantive representation at interagency and international meetings
Establish systematic monitoring of the debris environment
Provide the primary leadership and point of contact for the DoD

•Develop a better capability to characterize the space debris environment
Establish a debris model independent of the NASA model
ask MIT Lincoln Laboratory to analyze Haystack radar data to determine whether further measurements are required

•Provide independent assessment of the debris problem
Establish a nucleus of expertise in space measurements and data analysis

•Continue monitoring space launches, explosions, and catalogs
Calibrate Air Force sensors to track space debris
Complete modification and deployment of charge-coupled device–improved Ground- Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS)

•Continue established launch and on-orbit debris mitigation procedures

In addition of the great job frozen_snowman has done with this document I want to extend this document with a fuller version found at a military webpage adding some more data regarding Space Surveillance.


Space Surveillance


Background.

The Space Surveillance mission has been handled by the Air Force since
1957 when the first Sputniks were launched. The initial facility was at Hanscom AFB and was later moved to the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado Springs. The mission requirements were largely driven by the Soviet threat for all these years. In fact, the missile warning mission
has dominated the space surveillance mission to such an extent that the evolution of capability in the latter has been painfully slow and has lagged the state of the art substantially.

The space surveillance mission area remains an essential part of the Air Force function to support the warfighter with space assets. The threat to space assets and their supporting capability is evolving with the need to monitor an increasingly crowded environment. Operational spacecraft have in general been large objects easily tracked by the space surveillance network. The most serious problem with the current system is that the theory, software, and hardware used for orbit determination at Space Control Center (SCC) have evolved only slowly over the last 20 years, while the state of knowledge of orbit determination, the state of software and hardware technology, the sensitivity of sensors, and the accuracy of the data have advanced immensely.

This has precluded the system from taking advantage of the accuracy of the data to reduce the overall tasking load of the sensors, which at the same time would enable them to contribute more in other areas of space surveillance, such as debris monitoring, and consequently address more areas for the same total cost.


Asteroid and Comet Impact Warning for Earth


Background.

The growing concerns about the asteroid and comet threat to earth may
result in a new mission for the space surveillance system. The capability to integrate and perform this potential mission needs to be assessed as part of the future architecture of space surveillance. Asteroids and comets have struck the earth over its history in Russia, Yucatan, and the United States (Arizona). It is now believed that an asteroid impact caused the cataclysmic
extinction of the dinosaurs. Although impacts are rare, they could have devastating effects. At a minimum the Air Force should consider Deep Space Surveillance as a new mission area.

For more: Space Surveillance, Asteroids and Comets, and Space Debris