I worked as a researcher on orbital debris during university and now work full time on this and adjacent problems. My full write-up on the approach for using cheap radar data to assess orbital debris is here on my blog.

Orbital Debris

There has been a considerable increase in the number of things humans have lofted into space, specifically low-Earth orbit (LEO) in the past ~6 years. In 2016, there were about 6,000 satellites that had ever been launched into space, according to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. Of that, there were about 4,000 satellites orbiting the planet, many of them launched before the turn of the century by the USA and USSR between 1957 and 1999. At the time of writing this post (EOY 2022), there are about 8,500 satellites in orbit, and more than 12,000 satellites total have been thrown into space by humans.

Earth is a shared resource, and LEO is no different. The exponential nature of the growth in LEO use via satellites is not a harmless thing and could result in some nasty outcomes, namely Kessler Syndrome. When objects in orbit break up, the debris that is created often does not immediately deorbit and depending on the altitude, it can remain floating in the sky for eons. Except it doesn’t float – it careens around the planet at thousands of miles per hour with ludicrous amounts of kinetic energy. The danger is obvious, but what isn’t is the positive feedback loop of destruction and debris that feeds on the now numerous satellites in orbit: Kessler Syndrome. Even without the syndrome, space debris is still a dangerous and rather expensive threat – assets worth billions of dollars in space have to be monitored increasingly carefully to guard against collisions and it doesn’t always work.

Space Environmentalism

Dr. Moriba Jah, who was recently named a MacArthur Fellow for his work on the subject, is an astrodynamicist and prominent researcher on the subject of orbital debris. He and his colleagues have developed a platform for aggregating various data sources into a complete catalogue of space objects, ASTRIAGraph, as well as visualization tools like Wayfinder, available for free use in the public domain. In particular, the novel statistical methods employed in these tools highlight the discrepancies prominent between multiple data sources: data on space objects is often anything but tidy.

Researchers like Jah, including him...

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