Space Debris In The International Year Of Astronomy
Monday, February 23, 2009 at 04:58PM 
The UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space will meet again soon. The agenda of the meeting will include still another discussion of the need for countries to put space safety before commercial factors.
So, the Committee will again address the need to persuade all space-faring nations, including Iran, to adopt internationally approved codes for licensing and disposing of their spacecraft.
Of course, the United Nations' Peaceful Use Of Outer Space Committee has been meeting since the Sputnik launch in 1953 but despite more than fifty five years of discussion, safely disposing of spacecraft has never become a priority of the International community.
However, maybe this historical record of international inaction will now change since for the first time last week , two satellites crashed in space. The space crash was only the fourth orbital collision on record and the first between two intact satellites.
The Iridium 33 satellite was traveling at about 17,000mph, as it circled the globe in orbit every 100 minutes. Meanwhile, the Russian Kosmos 2251 satellite which has not been operational since 1995 has been gradually falling out of its original orbit about 490 miles above the Earth. The collision between the two satellites resulted in clouds of space debris that will circle the earth for thousands of years and will eventually threaten to impact other satellites.
The truth is that space debris has begun to pose a significant threat to space travel. Already, space shuttles on average now have to avoid space debris once a year. It is estimated that there are now 300,000 sizable objects orbiting the Earth, including roughly 12,000 satellites, of which only 6% are still functioning.
It is imperative that the international community begin to clean up space before space travel is put at risk and a view from a telescope provides a dubious view of orbiting space waste. In fact, there may be no time like the present to address the problem since the United Nations and the International Astronomical Union have joined forces to highlight 2009 as the International Year of Astronomy.
The International Year Of Astronomy marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first astronomical observation through a telescope. To mark this milestone, more than one hundred nations across the globe are collaborating to make the international community more aware of the universe we live in.
As a result, there are many exciting events in Astronomy that will be publicized throughout 2009. People in China and India can witness the longest solar eclipse of this century in July. An early evening sighting of Jupiter in October in the Northern Hemisphere should give some spectacular views. Also, the Leonid Meteor Shower in November 2009 is predicted to be one of most vivid ever.
2009 will also feature the final mission to repair and upgrade the aging Hubble Telescope. The shuttle mission that will take astronauts to the Hubble is currently scheduled for launch in May.
NASA intends to upgrade the Hubble Telescope, so that it will have more capability than ever before. It is a servicing mission that will pose considerable danger to the astronauts, but one that has the potential to provide science and astronomy with dramatic rewards for at least the next five years.
One of the key goals of the International Year Of Astronomy is to have as many people as possible look through a telescope as Galileo did for the first time 400 years ago. But promoting the excitement of Astronomy also highlights the increasing problem of space debris
The pristine view of man's final frontier is rapidly becoming compromised and it is necessary for the safety of future space travel that the international community begin to clean up the growing mess of space waste and debris. Dangerous waste dumps in orbit in space are something that a future astronomer should never have to see.
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