The Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space are the result of many years of work by the Committee and its Scientific and Technical Subcommittee.
Xi Jinping, President of the People's Republic of China, addresses the general debate of the 76th Session of the General Assembly of the UN (New York, 21-27 September 2021). Chinese President Xi today told the General Assembly, “Democracy is not a special right reserved to an individual country, but a right for the people of all countries to enjoy,” adding that recent global developments show once again that “military intervention from the outside and so-called democratic transformation entail nothing but harm.”
On 20 April 2021, ESA will host the 8th European Conference on Space Debris from Darmstadt, in Germany. Scientists, engineers, industry experts and policy makers will spend the virtual four day conference discussing the latest issues surrounding space debris. They will exchange the latest research, try to come up with solutions for potential problems and define the future direction of any necessary action. There are currently over 129 million objects larger than a millimetre in orbits around Earth. These range from inactive satellites to flakes of paint. But no matter how small the item of debris, anything travelling up to 56 000 km/h in an orbit is dangerous if it comes into contact with the many satellites that connect us around the world, be it for GPS, mobile phone data or internet connectivity. The solution is to take action before it’s too late. This is why ESA has commissioned ClearSpace-1 - the world’s first mission to remove space debris - for launch in 2025.
More than 27,000 pieces of orbital debris, or “space junk,” are tracked by the Department of Defense’s global Space Surveillance Network (SSN) sensors. Much more debris -- too small to be tracked, but large enough to threaten human spaceflight and robotic missions -- exists in the near-Earth space environment.
