Purdue professor, her team identify aspects of space junk
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Lafayette Journal & Courier



WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Associate professor at Purdue, Carolin Frueh and her team are investigating the causes of spacecrafts to turn into "space junk." Their findings reveal preventative measures of spacecrafts breaking into thousands of dangerous pieces.

According to Purdue's release, there have been more than 570 incidents of spacecraft fragmenting in Earth's orbit due to explosion, detonation or collision. While technology is in its beginning phases of testing what may help clean up the debris, it is still not clear how spacecrafts fragment to begin with.

This is one of Frueh's team's main points of focus.

“I like harsh, challenging problems that don’t have obvious solutions,” Frueh said in the release. "Because space objects are too far away to easily do experiments on or with them, we just observe these objects with a telescope. But even then, we don’t have much data on the objects, as they are not always visible or they’re too small to detect. The question is, ‘What can I still find out about this object with the little data that I can collect?’”

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Essentially putting together the most difficult puzzle out-of-this world, spacecrafts can shatter into hundreds or thousands of pieces, many of which are the size of a quarter inch or smaller and tend to travel faster than a bullet out of a gun at over 15,000 miles per hour.

In a collaboration with the University of Bern in Switzerland, Frueh and her teams discovered that even identical "upper stages" of spacecraft fragment for different reasons. Their study found these reasonings.

“It’s interesting that there wasn’t just one cause that had determined the fate of all three upper stages,” Frueh said in a statement to Purdue. “These objects normally just look like white dots, similar to stars against a night sky. It can be hard to tell which ones are objects that you have already identified."

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Frueh, according to Purdue, is one of only a handful of researchers using a technique called "light curves" to identify the breakdown of spacecraft components from from thousands of miles away based on how a spacecraft or its components reflect sunlight.

“It is like driving a car, where you can’t get out of the car to check if something has fallen off or gotten damaged. But you know that there might be a problem,” Frueh said. “An operator might notice that a satellite appears unstable or not charging properly. An outside perspective can tell if it’s because something broke off, or if a panel or antenna is not properly oriented, for example.”

Information learned by Frueh and her team via light curves can change and improve how satellites are designed in the future.

“There’s starting to be a lot more traffic in the cislunar space. We want to avoid some of the haphazard approaches we’ve done around Earth that clogs up everything,” Frueh said. “In a region where the dynamics are very different, what does that mean for space debris? Where are spacecraft going after a mission ends? How do we establish observations from that space to track objects? The goal is sustainable use of space.”