Space debris include space junk, space waste and defunct objects in orbit around Earth. It includes spent rocket, old satellites and fragments and they pollute space. They usually can be tracked, but how about measuring their quantity and relating the values to threshold limits?
We roughly know the total mass of all of the rockets, satellites, telescopes,
and other stuff we sent to space via all ( less than 10 nations ), and we know
the mass of the amount that left earth, and the mass of the objects that returned
to Earth. We can then calculate the mass of what remains. There should be
an international agreement to supply a reentry motor with all devices launched into
space, and a finite time period when it will automatically align itself, slows its orbit,
and re-enter and burn up.
Putting a reentry motor on every space shuttle tile that flicks off would not be practical.
Makinde,
Indeed such efforts have been made. LDEF, which was brought back in the 90s, was an excellent 'witness plate' for the LEO debris environment. As such the impact damage that it had recorded was used to improve the models that were then current for the debris population around the Earth.
There is an argument to have a larger and more persistent means of sensing the debris population.
One of the major problems is that items less than about 10-cm are hard to detect and/or track with terrestrial radar. What about space-based radar? There are satellites in orbit that could do this, should they be re-tasked..
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