Space junk should be dealt with at the earliest: UAE astronomer
dubai — Space agencies around the world need to ensure they mitigate risks of space debris when sending objects outside planet Earth, a top UAE astronomer has urged.
In the past 10 months, there has been three incidents where space junk has lit up the UAE skies. The latest incident happened just last week. Nasa has previously said that more than 500,000 pieces of space debris floating around Earth’s orbit were tracked by their team. The US space agency had said that Earth’s orbit is “filled with rubbish”. Space debris has been a growing concern for professionals in the space industry as it creates potential danger of the junk colliding with manned or unmanned missions.
Hasan Al Hariri, CEO of the Dubai Astronomy Group, said the UAE does not face any danger from space debris because it burns in the atmosphere when it falls down, however — because of the increased space activity from agencies worldwide — chances of space debris can grow.
“The space activity is an accumulative process. When we started going to space, there were no rules or regulations, anybody can launch anything and they didn’t think what will follow after. The main concentration was only to launch the satellite out, which meant that the goal has been achieved. What was left behind was what happens when part of it falls. We reached to the point where an incident happened and that brought attention to the real concerned departments. They thought ‘we have a lot of debris now, what should we do?’. This is when agencies started studying about this and thinking of ways to prevent it,” Al Hariri said.
He said the Chinese space agency has caused hundreds of pieces of debris loose in space when it de- stroyed one of its own satellites in 2007 with a missile. There are still more than 2,500 pieces of debris that has been detected in space from the 2007 incident.
When we started going to space, there were no rules or regulations, anybody could launch anything and they didn’t think what will follow after.” Hasan Al Hariri, CEO, Dubai Astronomy Group