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China has canceled the hosting of the 25th meeting of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC).
The China National Space Administration was slated to host the IADC April 23-26 at the China Academy of Space Technology in Beijing.
The IADC is a confab of countries that, in a governmental forum, discusses worldwide coordination of activities related to issues of human-made and natural debris in space.
On January 11, China created the largest debris cloud of satellite fragments in Earth orbit after they destroyed their own weather satellite in an anti-satellite test.
The April issue of NASA’s Orbital Debris Quarterly News labels the Chinese ASAT test as creating the most severe orbital debris cloud in history.
The newsletter notes that while the final tally of debris greater than five centimeters in size could well exceed 2,000, the number of bits of junk with a size of 1 centimeter or more is estimated to be as large as 35,000. Both values represent an increase of more than 15 percent of the known debris environment at the start of the year.
China’s ASAT debris field will remain scattered throughout low Earth orbit for many, many years to come, the newsletter noted, and will encircle the globe before year’s end.
Furthermore, the ASAT test directly conflicts with Guideline 5.2.3 of the Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines of the IADC - guidelines that were officially accepted by the China National Space Administration in October 2002, the NASA newsletter explains.
