Agencies across the world working to tackle space junk: Reddy

The space debris has emerged as a new cause of global concern prompting the relevant agencies world-wide to make a joint bid to find a solution to the meance, says defence minister's Scientific Advisor Satheesh Reddy.
"Space debris is a serious concern today for the entire world. The ISRO has conducted a conference on this. That is going to be an emerging subject and also a serious issue as a large number of satellites are launched every year all over the world.
"All space agencies of respective countries (including ISRO) are working to have a coordinated system to tackle this problem," Reddy told PTI on the sidelines of a programme at Osmania University here.

According to European Space Agency (ESA), over 4,900 space launches since 1957 have led to an on-orbit population of more than 18,000 tracked objects. Only 1,100 are functional spacecraft. The remaining are space debris - the objects no longer serving any useful purpose.
About 64 per cent of the routinely-tracked objects are fragments from some 250 breakups, explosions and collisions of satellites or rocket bodies. In addition, there is an evidence of a much larger population of the debris that cannot be tracked operationally.
An estimated 7,00,000 objects larger than 1 cm and 170 million objects larger than 1 mm are expected to be orbiting around earth.

This large amount of space hardware has a total mass of more than 7,500 tonnes.

Speaking about the research programmes in Space Science, Reddy said that Osmania University has the calibre to undertake the subject and work with the government.
"Osmania University has a very good telescope with a very good object viewing capacity. Why not Osmania University revive its subject and work in this area so that we have much more flexibility tomorrow in launching our satellites," Reddy said.
Replying to a query, he said India needs a large number of cyber security professionals in future and universities across the country need to focus on the subject, given its importance.

According to him, only National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra is offering a masters degree in cyber security.