The first job of this state-of-the-art equipment will be to enable researchers to precisely track the trajectory of 300 previously identified pieces of space debris for a period of no less than six months.
Paweł Lejba, the head of the observatory, emphasized the importance of this upgrade, stating, "Thanks to a grant from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, we were able to purchase a high-power, pulsed, nanosecond Nd:YAG laser along an integrated optical-laser rangefinder system, which is being directly developed at our Laser Station, a part of the Astrogeodynamic Observatory CBK PAN in Borowiec."
Space debris, particularly in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), has become an increasingly troublesome issue. Approximately 30,000 pieces of debris larger than 10 cm have also been identified in this orbital zone of under 2,000 km from the Earth's surface.
Traveling at speeds of around 7 kilometers per second, they threaten satellites and major objects such as the International Space Station. The ISS orbits the Earth at an altitude of around 400 km, circling the Earth around 15 times per day.
In 2022 alone, the European Space Agency reported, 2,409 payloads were launched into orbit. Most of them are small satellites designed to burn up on re-entry in the atmosphere after two years. With ongoing expansion of commercial space activities such as the StarLink internet satellite system, the number of artificial objects circling the Earth is growing quickly.
A 2009 collision of an Iridium 33 and a defunct Russian Cosmos 2251 satellites, the first such disaster in history, resulted in total destruction of both units, and the creation of over 700 pieces of debris.
To mitigate this risk, the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) was established in 1993. It issues guidelines that inactive satellites must be removed from orbit within 25 years of their mission's completion. This directive aims to prevent the so-called Kessler Syndrome, a scenario where the density of objects in space is so high that collisions between debris would cause a cascade of further collisions.
The new laser at the Borowiec station, funded by a PLN 2.3 million grant and provided by Warsaw-based Eurotek International, is a critical tool in addressing this challenge. Set to be operational in the second half of 2024, it will offer precise information on the quantity and orbits of space debris, supporting efforts to clean up space. Its detection system allows for the reception of photons sent by the laser towards objects located in Earth's orbit. When the beam reaches the tracked object, it will bounce off it and return to the rangefinder, which will in turn enable precise determination of the object's altitude and speed relative to Earth.
The Borowiec Laser Station, part of the Astrogeodynamic Observatory and a member of the International Laser Ranging Service (ILRS) since 1988, has been active since the 1980s. It performs laser measurements of the distance to Earth's artificial satellites and space debris, marking it as a unique institution in Poland.
The Observatory also hosts the Time Laboratory with the country's most accurate atomic clocks and one of the three stations of the large international radio telescope LOFAR.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP
