OREANDA-NEWS. February 20, 2009. Yury Zaitsev, member of the Russian Engineering Science Academy, says that space debris in LEO can cause termination of human and automatic space missions.

"Unfortunately, trash chute has not been created yet", states the scientist.

According to him, Russia and the USA both track the space debris and analyse it`s trajectories. Returning the upper stages back into the atmosphere seems feasible, by initializing a retroburn. However, for GTO satellites it is not possible, the upper stage will remain there.

Moreover, the geostationary orbit has even more debris than the lower orbits. "The debris in GTO are almost "immortal", they ramp about the satellites. In the lower orbits, the debris come down little by little, and eventually burn in the atmosphere", states Zaitsev.

To fix the problem, says the scientist, an international legislation is needed to define strict rules for deorbiting the non-operational satelites.