Mapping Orbital Debris Risk: How a Student Esri Story Map Reveals the Hidden Traffic Jam Above Earth
Mapping Orbital Debris Risk How a Student Esri Story Map Reveals the Hidden Traffic Jam Above Earth By Gervais W. Tabopda | Georgia Institute of Technology | For tabopda.blogspot.com Figure 1. Near-Earth orbit is increasingly an operating environment, not an empty frontier. We cannot manage what we cannot see. Mapping orbital debris is the first step toward explaining, regulating, insuring, and sustaining the orbital commons. My Aerospace student Lauren Forcey, under my supervision, performed an Esri StoryMap GIS project on one of the most urgent but least visible challenges of the modern space age: orbital debris. Her project, “Invisible Orbits, Visible Consequences,” explores how thousands of satellites, retired spacecraft, rocket bodies, and fragments of human-made material are transforming Earth’s orbital environment into a crowded and increasingly fragile infrastructure zone. What began as a GIS class project quickly revealed a mu...
