Moriba Jah, Program Lead of the Space Security and Safety (SSS) program at the Strauss Center, Director of the Advanced Sciences and Technology Research in Astronautics (ASTRIA) program, and Associate Professor of Aerospace engineering and Engineering Mechanics in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, recently published a graph tool which illustrates the orbits of 1500 satellites and space junk items.
These objects, which are all within low earth orbit, consistently cross paths at very high speeds, increasing the likelihood of collisions which would produce further space debris. Read more and view the tool here.
The University of Texas at Austin has received a $9.3 million seed grant from the Texas Space Commission to establish the Space Domain Awareness (SDA) Tools, Applications, and Processing (TAP) Lab, becoming the first academic institution to work directly with the United States Space Force to detect, analyze, and counter space-based threats in near real time. Space Security, Safety, & Sustainability...
At the Strauss Center’s “Operational Assurance for All” 12th Annual Space Traffic Conference, Aarti Holla-Maini, head of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, highlighted growing difficulties in contacting satellite operators to coordinate maneuvers and prevent collisions as orbital traffic increases. The conference was recently highlighted in SpaceNews. Holla-Maini revealed that her office intervened twice in the past year...
Space Security, Safety, & Sustainability Program Lead Moriba Jah was recently interviewed for an article published in NDTV on the growing problem of space debris in the context of the Chinese Shenzhou-20 Incident. On November 25, China’s Shenzhou-20 noticed damage and cracking to the spacecraft’s window due to excess space debris in orbit. “Until countries and companies consider data accuracy...