NASA creates space sustainability division to consolidate orbital debris activities | Space

PARIS — NASA has established a space sustainability division that will consolidate much of the work the agency is doing on orbital debris and related issues.

Speaking at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference Sept. 19, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said the agency received the required approvals from congressional appropriations committees the previous day for the reorganization required to create the division.

The division will be a “unified organization that will integrate our operational, research and policy functions,” she said.  Those functions had been spread out among several offices spread out among different NASA mission directorates and centers.

She noted eight different entities within NASA have some role in orbital debris, including the Orbital Debris Program Office, Meteoroid Environments Office and Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis program. Other parts of NASA’s science and space technology directorates also play roles in space sustainability, along with offices involved in policy.

“We can’t move every organization under this one umbrella,” she said, such as the trajectory operations officer, or TOPO, at the Johnson Space Center, who has responsibilities beyond orbital debris conjunction assessments for the International Space Station. “But what we can do is move the organizations…