US defence industry enterprise Northrop Grumman Corporation announced on the 13th July, the company will build a more advanced outer space trash tracking system in accordance with the agreement signed with the US Air Force.
Northrop Grumman Corporation, headquarted in Los Angeles, said in a statement that, the radar tracking system by the name of “Outer Space Guardrail” will cost US$30 million, and its purpose is to track and observe the continuously increasing outer space trash and the mini and micro satellites that are still flying in the orbit.
The statement said, the “Outer Space Guardrail” will replace the “Outer Space Reconnaissance System” that the US Air Force built in 1961, because the old system is no longer able to cope with the vast amount of increased outer space trash.
Chief of the Extraordinary Item Division of Northrop Grumman Corp, Ricky Davies, said that, as compared to the old system, the new system can discover and track outer space trash “with more accuracy and speed”, thereby effectively preventing collision accidents in the orbit, and avoiding the damage that outer space trash could cause to satellites.
According to the company’s introduction, selection of site for the “Outer Space Guardrail” is currently in progress, and Australia has been listed as one of the three candidate sites, the other two is still under consideration.
US media report that in the past 50 years, mankind have sent up some 30,000 trackable and observable objects into the outer space, among which were many aerocraft whose entire bodies or wreckages remain in the outer space as the outer space trash, after “retiring”. According to incomplete data, there are more than 9,000 pieces of fragments of 10 centimetres diameter in the terrestrial space, and fragments measuring more than 1.2 centimetres in diameter amount to several hundreds of thousands. (Gao Yuan)