“Low Earth Orbit (LEO), once sparsely populated, has become the new frontier for newly launched satellites,” said Giovanni Zanalda, Director of the Space Diplomacy Lab (SDL) in a recent Duke Today article by Susan Miller. “Imagine two interstate highways intersecting at odd angles, with cars speeding at thousands of miles per hour and no traffic lights. That’s what our orbital environment has become.”
Last year, Professor Giovanni Zanalda and Physics Professsor, Arun Kannawadi, received a Duke Faculty Advancement Seed Grant Program to raise awareness about satellite light pollution’s impact on astronomy, as well as the growing threat of space debris and congestion in low Earth orbit. Their project also explores the geopolitical implications of these challenges for the safety and sustainability of scientific and commercial space activities.
Kannawadi and Zanalda have also organized meetings at Duke with people from other academic institutions, the private sector and policy circles as part of efforts to address these issues from both scientific and policy perspectives – from renowned astrophysicists Hugh Lewis and Jonathan McDowell to legal and policy experts.
“We see this as making a compelling case for launching multidisciplinary research projects and designing new academic curricula as it has been done with other global challenges,” said Zanalda.
“This is a very complex problem in the sense that it’s going to need a lot of people with different expertise to come together to be able to do something about it,” Kannawadi added.
Professors Giovanni Zanalda and Arun Kannawadi are members of the new Duke SPACE Initiative (DSI), Dukeʼs interdisciplinary initiative combining astrophysics, space policy, diplomacy, law, engineering, economics, history, medicine and life sciences. It unites hard science with policy-making to shape human exploration of the cosmos from deep-sky cosmology to the geopolitics of Mars.
Read the full article by Susan Miller in Duke Today: https://today.duke.edu/2025/10/dont-look-space-filled-junk?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Don%E2%80%99t%20look%20up%3A%20Space%20is%20filled%20with%20junk&utm_campaign=Dukedelivered2025_10_30
