KALUGA, April 14 Russian President Vladimir Putin approved the creation of the federal project «Milky Way», the purpose of which is to track space debris in orbit, said the head of Roscosmos Yuri Borisov .
«This is a problem — space debris … We have a program, I think it will soon turn into a federal project, because I met with the president and got his consent to develop a federal project called» Milky Way «. This program provides for tracking, first of all, all space debris,» Borisov said, talking to students at the Tsiolkovsky film festival in Kaluga.
He noted that particles of space debris smaller than 10 centimeters could not be traced. «It is necessary to develop both optical and radar, ground-based and orbital means of observation, collection and processing of information in order to predict and warn of possible collisions (with space debris — ed.),» Borisov added.
Earlier Vladimir Solovyov, general designer for manned complexes and systems of Russia, said that Roskosmos detects meteoroid breakdowns on the ISS much more often than on the Soviet Salyut-7 station forty years ago. According to him, this is due to the fact that humanity has heavily polluted orbital space.