Apologices for the bump but here is a brief but discussion with Donald Kessler about the creation of the Kessler syndrome concept in AIAA’sAerospace America:
and a discussion about the phenomenon and some prognostications of what will happen if greater efforts aren’t made to mitigate orbital debris:
As for accidental collisions, meet physicist Mark Matney, whose first boss at NASA was none other than Kessler. Matney works in the Orbital Debris Program Office at NASA Johnson, and perhaps not surprisingly, he can rattle off the worst collisions to date. The most recent serious incident came in 2009 when an Iridium communications satellite and a Russian Cosmos satellite collided, generating some 2,000 pieces of debris at least 10 centimeters in diameter.
“I tell people that’s a harbinger of things to come,” Matney says.
In his view, Iridium-Cosmos was “the opening move” of the Kessler Syndrome: It is one of several unplanned collisions that have occurred, as Kessler predicted, and debris from Iridium-Cosmos could cause future collisions that grow debris, he warns. It’s difficult, Matney says, to look at orbit right now and say for certain that a cascade is in motion, because of the long time frame over which Kessler Syndrome would play out.
“I don’t think it’s acute yet,” he says, but “we’re on a timescale of something like a one in 10 chance each year of another major collision.”
Stranger