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Debris tracking improved; the warning system did not

Sensors now see objects a few centimetres across. Operators still get conjunction alerts they cannot act on.

Debris tracking improved; the warning system did not
Debris tracking improved; the warning system did not — XENVORA Photograph: This view is NASA's C-band, Debris Radar antenna inside the radome at a site on North Merritt Island in Florida. Original from NASA. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel., NASA / Rawpixel (CC0) · Licence

Detection genuinely improved. Catalogues have grown, radar and optical coverage is denser, and small-object tracking is no longer hopeless.

The alert is not the problem to solve

A satellite operator receiving forty conjunction warnings a week, most with probabilities too uncertain to justify fuel, is not better informed. They are saturated.

What is missing is agreed thresholds and a coordination protocol for who manoeuvres. Two operators both dodging the same object have twice caused the near-miss they were avoiding.

Better data made the physics tractable. The governance is still the open problem.

Samir Bahri
Space & Orbital Systems
Samir Bahri

Samir tracks launch manifests, orbital debris and the slow industrialisation of low Earth orbit.

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