Orbital Debris—Common Thread, Common Threat

• Both accidents and intentional destructive events produce large quantities of orbital debris that remain as threats for years, even centuries.
• Smaller amounts of debris are also produced through routine operations.
• In short, orbital debris is a global problem and represents an opportunity to work together to ensure space sustainability.
• The U.S. military maintains the world's best orbital tracking network and satellite catalog, which includes over 21,000 objects in space measuring 10 centimeters in diameter or larger.
• What cannot be reliably tracked yet are the objects smaller than 10 cen­timeters, because these are too small to follow consistently.
• Scientists es­timate that about 500,000 bits of junk measuring one to ten centimeters are believed to be orbiting Earth, and another several hundred million bits smaller than one centimeter exist.
• Because all objects in low Earth orbit travel at extremely high speed, even small ones can cripple or destroy working spacecraft or endanger astronauts.
• Knowing more about the nature of the problem is critical to space sustain­ability. Sharing information about or­bital debris, mitigating its production and even removing existing debris rep­resent key objectives toward ensuring that conditions in outer space are favor­able to continued use.