Space project aims to track hazards in the Earth's orbit

The ESA’s Space Situational Awareness Preparatory Programme stems from the threat of collisions between objects in orbit, harmful space weather and potential strikes by natural objects that cross the Earth’s orbit.

UK involvement is through the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Chilbolton Observatory, which tracks objects in low-Earth orbits and Space Insight’s Starbrook sensor, which is trained higher up.

‘With more than 20,000 tracked objects, including around 1,000 operational satellites orbiting the Earth, we need to be aware of potential collisions. At closing speeds reaching 50,000km per hour, even the smallest bits of space debris can cause serious harm to spacecraft,’ said Prof Richard Crowther, a space debris expert from the UK Space Agency.

Starbrook is a ground-based wide-field optical sensor capable of surveying the increasingly large number of objects in the higher-Earth orbits, such as the geostationary and GPS-type orbits. It detects objects as small as 1m in size at up to 40,000km from the Earth.