India and her Space Debris Policy
Space Debris can form a threat to currently operating space vehicles and to people on Earth if it deorbits. To give the other side, there has been less than 10 instances of debris actually falling on habitated areas and there too without any serious injuries. But, still as more students in universities and more nations are able to access space technology and build satellites for the development of their country, the problem is not going away, atleast in the near future. There needs to be some way of either utilising this debris or removing this debris without any serious consequences.
India is a member of two organisations that deals with the problems of space debris - United Nations Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS) and the Inter-Agency Space Debris Co-ordination Committee (IADC). A recent paper by V Adimurthy, M Y S Prasad and S K Shivakumar titled "Space Mission Planning and Operations", published in the Current Science magazine in Vol. 93 No. 12, had this to say on the topic:
In the design of PSLV final stage, which uses earthstorable liquid propellants, a propellant venting system has been designed. ISRO’s launch vehicle, GSLV, also employs passivation of the cryogenic upper stage at the end of its useful mission. In the operational phase, the last stage of PSLV has been passivated beginning with PSLV-C4, which was successfully launched in September 2002. With the implementation of this passivation, the possibility of on-orbit fragmentation has been minimized in all the future flights of PSLV. India’s launch vehicles,
PSLV and GSLV, and the satellites IRS, INSAT and GSAT series are designed in such a way that no operational debris is created in the launch and deployment phases of the mission.
That seems to be pretty comprehensive. The paper further states that most of the Indian satellites are re-robited "on a case-by-case basis, consistent with national service requirements". ISRO also has developed a space debris proximity analysis software that it uses regularily to keep a watch on currently active satellites, planning launch windows and launches with minimum debris and study the break-up fragmentation during launch.
Since there is a new race to Moon and Mars, I hope that these parameters are kept in mind there as well so that we don't have orbital debris everywhere we go.
In the light of such technology being available to India, one wonders why similar strategies were not used for USA-193 which was recently shot down by a US Navy missile.
Posted at 11:58AM Feb 26, 2008 by Pradeep in Space in India | Comments[0]