Orbital debris as an energy management problem

Managing the hazards from orbital debris is fundamentally an issue of managing the residual energy associated with operations in space. Access to and operations in space require a large expenditure of energy. Current objects placed into orbit contain a large amount of residual energy. This energy can include stored energy in the form of unburned propellant, batteries, or pressurized containers, but always includes an even larger amount of energy in the form of kinetic energy. The importance of this residual energy is that it is the energy source for re-distributing the kinetic energy into various debris sizes. The only natural “sink” for the residual energy is atmospheric drag, which is more fundamentally expressed as an energy loss rate. By approaching orbital debris as an energy management rather than object management problem, some of the fundamental issues concerning orbital debris become more obvious. For example, the amount of kinetic energy in orbit far exceeds the amount of stored energy; consequently any longterm debris management strategy must consider managing kinetic energy. These principles can be applied to both low Earth orbit and Geosynchronous orbit and illustrate the need for different strategies in these two regions.