October 2015
Space debris, Kessler Syndrome, and the unreasonable expectation of certainty
...render access to low Earth orbit all but impossible – a process commonly referred to as the ‘Kessler Syndrome’ after the debris scientist Donald Kessler – the reality is not likely to be on the scale of these predictions or the events depicted in the...
April 2019
Wake-up call for debris creation in geostationary orbit
... 7th European Conference on Space Debris in 2017, it was concluded that in some regions of LEO we already have the Kessler Syndrome (collisional cascading) and it will now require active debris removal to reverse it. At times one has to wonder at the...
March 2016
Space debris conundrum for international law makers
... General Assembly, Annex, International Legal Materials 1967, Vol. 6, 386-390. 2 The term Kessler Syndrome, named after Donald J. Kessler who first alerted to this devastating potential of debris proliferation in 1978, denotes a runaway cascade...
October 2015
Green cosmonautics: an ideal to strive for
... become impossible because the risk of collision with space debris will be too great. This is what the Kessler syndrome, also known as the cascading effect7, warns us about. Every orbit has its own “critical density” for...
March 2015
Congested, contested, and invested: of space debris, risky launches and private initiative
... interfered with its attitude controls so that it was able to successfully transmit data for only seven days. Kessler Syndrome Scientists believe that there is enough human-generated space debris in the critical low-Earth orbit to enable...
April 2019
Cleaning up space
... other satellites. This concept of a cascading increase in debris is not new. NASA scientist Donald Kessler originated a theory – now known as the Kessler Syndrome - in 1978 describing a self-sustaining, cascading collision of space debris in LEO...
