Next Meeting Announced!

The 2nd annual meeting will be held during the 61st International Astrodynamics Conference in Prague, Czech Republic from September 27 through October 1, 2010. The meeting will be held on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 from 4 - 6 PM. The meeting room location is still to be determined.

Welcome!

The American Astronautical Society has been in existence for more than five decades (founded on January 22, 1954), and has over 1400 individual members and 40 corporate and institutional sponsors. As you are probably well aware, Space Surveillance is an area of national and international concern. After extensive searching, it was determined that there was no formal professional society or technical committee relevant to Space Surveillance. With authorization from the AAS Board of Directors, we have decided to organize the new AAS Space Surveillance Technical Committee.

Space is becoming more densely populated both through the continued launching of objects into geocentric orbit and through the generation of large numbers of small debris in collisions, explosions and other events on-orbit. The problems of detecting, tracking, identifying and predicting the future states of all these objects are inherently difficult and are compounded by the technical ability to build very small functioning satellites. New sensor systems are being developed, but as sensors become more advanced, our ability to detect and track objects leads to an observable population of more than 100,000 space objects in the next few years. These and other issues make Space Surveillance capabilities a critical area of attention for many nations. With the growing number of debris, the world faces a global problem that poses a hazard and a threat to our space environment for both human and robotic utilization of space. The objective of this newly formed Space Surveillance Committee will be to address the many challenges facing us and adhere to the high standards of the AAS society in general.