W. Flury

TL;DR: In this paper, the National Research Council formed an international committee to examine the orbital debris issue, and the committee was asked to draw upon available data and analyses to characterize the current debris environment, project how this environment might change in the absence of new measures to alleviate debris proliferation, examine ongoing alleviation activities, explore measures to address the problem, and develop recommendations on technical methods to solve it.

TL;DR: In this paper, a survey of eccentric orbits, covering in particular the GTO region used by the European Ariane launchers, indicate that there is small-size debris not only in the geostationary ring (GEO) orbit range but also in a much wider range of orbits.

Abstract: The space debris population in low Earth orbits (LEO) has been extensively studied during the last decade and reasonable models covering all size ranges were produced. Information on the distribution of objects in the geostationary ring (GEO), however, is still comparatively sparse. Until quite recently the population of man-made objects in GEO had to be inferred solely from the about 900 continuously tracked objects and the modeling of the two explosions known to have occurred in GEO. Optical observations from the last two years performed with ESA's 1-m telescope at the Teide observatory in Tenerife changed the situation substantially. A hitherto unknown but significant population of small-size objects with diameters as small as ten centimeters has been detected in GEO. Objects in highly-eccentric orbits crossing the GEO region, in particular objects in geostationary transfer orbits (GTO), also contribute to the density of space debris in GEO. This family is even less well known than the GEO population, although many explosion events were reported in this orbital region. The paper will summarize recent results from the ESA GEO survey and describe the techniques and first results of a trial GTO survey.

TL;DR: In this paper, a common search strategy was proposed for the detection of small-size space debris in the geosynchronous orbit (GEO), probably as the result of breakups.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a short summary of the different discoveries which resulted from the early surveys with ESA's 1-meter telescope in Tenerife and AIUB's 1m ZIMLAT telescope followed by a discussion of the current activities to build up and maintain an orbit catalogue of small-size debris enabling physical characterization of the debris objects trough photometry, light curve and reflectance spectroscopy observations.