By Vijay Grover
Creating yet another milestone and boosting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of becoming Atma Nirbhar in Space, India has taken a big step to boost self-reliance in safeguarding its space assets. With the ISRO System for Safe and Sustainable Space Operation and Management (IS4OM) launch, India achieved a milestone in July. The high-tech facility in Bengaluru allows India to work on eliminating Space Debris that poses a risk to humankind.
Speaking to IA&D, Jitendra Singh, the Union Minister for Space, said, “In 1957, there were only Space Debris today there is over 25,000 space debris that needs to be monitored. We are proud that Indian scientists will be able to play a key role in securing our assets and decide on how they wish to proceed with clearing them from space”.
The IS40M project is a system conceived with a holistic approach toward ensuring the safety and sustainability of the space environment. About 2,000 active satellites are orbiting Earth now; there are also 3,000 dead ones littering space. A more significant challenge is that there are around 34,000 pieces of space junk bigger than 10 centimetres in size and millions of smaller pieces that could prove disastrous if they hit something else. Space junk results from the countries launching objects from Earth, and they remain in orbit until they re-enter the earth’s atmosphere.
Some objects in lower orbits return quickly; for the most part, they burn up and don’t reach the ground. But debris or satellites at altitudes of over 36,000 kilometres, where communications and weather satellites are often placed in geostationary orbits, continue to circle the Earth for hundreds of years. Some of the space junk results from collisions or anti-satellite tests in orbit. When two satellites collide, they can smash apart into thousands of new pieces, creating new debris. This is rare, but several countries, including the USA, China and India, have used missiles to practice blowing up their satellites.
Space junk poses no significant risk to space exploration efforts; it threatens other satellites in orbit. These satellites must be monitored to be kept safe by moving them out of the way of incoming space junk to ensure they don’t get hit and potentially damaged or destroyed. IS4OM, through the advanced monitoring set-up, secures and monitors Indian Space assets and cooperates in the global effort. ISRO Chairman Somanath said, “We work together with many countries in following the norms laid by the United Nations whilst working on risk assessment and a strategy for mitigation of the space debris.”
India’s efforts are a part of the space situational awareness (SSA) programme to identify space debris and monitor them through research and development, encompassing space object fragmentation and break-up modelling, space debris population and micrometeoroid environment modelling and near-earth orbits, among others. The United Nations mandates that all space companies remove their satellites from orbit within 25 years of the end of their mission. Many satellites often fail, and to tackle this problem, several companies worldwide have come up.
