Union Minister inaugurates IS4OM to safeguard Indian space assets

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Subject : Science and Technology

Section:Space

Context:

What is ISRO System for Safe & Sustainable Operations Management (IS4OM)?

It is ISRO’s holistic approach to ensure the safety of our space assets and thus, sustains the utilization of outer space for national development
The new facility based in Bengaluru will perform a host of functions – safeguarding India’s space assets, protecting them from space debris, predicting the orbital movement of debris, predicting likely collisions and coordinating with global agencies for all of the above.
This is not about (space)traffic management alone, it is about keeping orbits available to everyone, operating in space without causing problems to one another, and ensuring sustainable use

Different functions of ‘IS40M’:

Firstly it is about using radars and optical observation to watch and tag objects in space. In case an object poses a threat to our satellite, we must accordingly move our satellite out of harm’s way and also inform foreign agencies(whose satellites are in the vicinity) about our collision avoidance maneuver.
In addition to this, the objects that are likely to fall back onto the earth, asteroids that are on collision course with earth will also have to be tracked.
In response to ever-growing space object population and the risk of collisions in space, it undertakes observation and monitoring of space objects and space environment, processing the observations for orbit determination, object characterization and cataloging, analysis of space environment evolution, risk assessment and mitigation, and, data exchange and collaboration

Why we need space Traffic Management System?

The number of satellites orbiting earth are increasing in number, this also naturally means an increase in space debris
Debris includes everything from the spent upper stages of rockets, and defunct satellites, to even smaller objects that emerge after debris collisions
Given that these objects orbit the earth at nearly 27,000 km per hour, any collision with space assets can prove catastrophic and could cause a massive outage of space-based services.

Hence, it becomes increasingly important to have a ‘Space Traffic Management System’