What goes up doesn’t always come down, which creates a bit of a problem for astronauts and satellite operators.
Moriba Jah, a former NASA navigator, plans to use his new post at the University of Arizona to help find, characterize and predict the movement of space junk.
The Department of Defense is tracking 23,000 large pieces of debris — such as pieces of spent satellites and rocket boosters.
NASA estimates there are up to half a million objects as large as a marble, and millions more as small as a flake of paint, that could disable a geo-positioning satellite or an International Space Station.
Right now, said Jah, the job of defending the 1,100 or so satellites and spacecraft in orbit around Earth is being done with limited resources by NASA and the Department of Defense.
The NASA Orbital Debris Program Office has four employees, he said, and no mandate to do the scientific research needed to understand how debris acts and interacts.
Jah said he wants to make the UA a center for that type of research. He was given a joint appointment with the College of Engineering and the Office for Research and Discovery to put together a program in “space object behavioral sciences.”
Jah, an aerospace engineer formerly with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, helped navigate multiple NASA and European Space Agency missions to Mars from 1999 to 2006.
More recently, he led research on space object behavior for the Air Force.
There are plenty of questions that need to be answered about the deteriorating space debris and the proliferation of potentially dangerous objects in orbit, he said.
“We don’t completely understand the physics of why the objects exist, how the material degrades and what processes are generating more objects,” Jah said.
The UA is a great place to answer those questions, he said, with expertise in astronomy, planetary science, optical science, engineering and computing.
The problem is serious, he said. “Stuff gets hit all the time. Every time the space shuttle went up it would turn up with pitted glass, and they were flying it backwards on purpose to avoid that.
“Much like the oceans, space is getting polluted and we don’t even know how that’s happening,” Jah said.
Most people are not aware of the problem, but that could change quickly if space debris took out some satellites.
“I’m so reliant on the GPS on my smartphone. I can’t tell you the last time I consulted a map,” said Jah. “If that service disappeared — that’s a bad day.”
