Space Debris: Proceedings of Meeting B8 of the Cospar Twenty-Ninth Plenary Meeting Held in Washington DC, USA, 28 August - 5 September 1992

Space surveillance has confirmed the increasing number of large and useless objects orbiting the Earth. Of the known 7000 objects which have a minimum size of about ten centimetres in low Earth orbit and about one metre in the geostationary orbit, only about 6% are active satellites. Over 40% are fragments of breakups of rocket upper stages and satellites. The increasing amount of man-made objects in space as a result of space operation now gives cause for concern. Several independent analyses conclude that current practices in space will eventually lead to collisions between Earth orbiting objects. The forty papers presented in this volume comprise an overview of the current situation and also outline measures which could be taken to control the growth of debris.