Friday 16 July 2010

Ozzie space junk dreams

Northern Hemisphere summertime is the usual period that the news is lazy, and strange mistaken news items pop up like another sighting of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, chickens that came before the egg (or not), and now an Ozzie corporation that thinks it can solve the space junk threath by selling tracking data from to-be-build tracking lasers.

This company must live in the Dream Time. It is not tracking itself that is the problem. USSTRATCOM basically tracks everything 10 cm+ in LEO plus a lot smaller stuff. The real problems, are problems that additional laser tracking data is not going to solve:

a) the lack of computer power to determine which detections concern the same object;

b) most importantly: the lack of computer power to timely calculate risk situations for thousands of objects in dynamic orbits.

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