Space debris must be removed from orbit says ESA
by Stuart Clark from on (#2KVWY)
It's time to start actively removing space debris from orbit or risk disaster, says the European Space Agency
It was on 23 August at 17:07 GMT that spacecraft operators at the European Space Agency's (ESA) control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, noticed something was going wrong. Their flagship Earth observation satellite, Sentinel-1A, had suddenly jumped into a slightly different orbit and a slightly different orientation.
More seriously, the electrical power had dropped, and was not returning to normal. The spacecraft was only in its third year in orbit. Activating on-board cameras that had been used two years earlier to monitor the deployment of the solar panels, the operators found the problem.