Abstract: 

As Earth orbit grows more crowded, the risks we face from re-entering space debris are growing alarmingly. A key challenge that we face in understanding the hazards posed by these objects, and their impact on the environment, is that we cannot easily track them once they enter the terminal phase of disintegration within the atmosphere. In this talk I will discuss how seismic data from open-source networks can be used to offer unprecedented insight into the trajectories, speeds, and fragmentation patterns of items of debris as they re-enter the atmosphere, and the routes that we are taking to turn this finding into an operational pipeline to inform rapid responses to debris fall events.
 
Bio:

Ben Fernando is the Frederick Reines Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and was previously the Blaustein Fellow at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He completed his undergraduate degree at Imperial College London and his PhD at the University of Oxford. He is on the Science Teams for the NASA InSight, Dragonfly, VIPER, Curiosity, and Farside Seismic Suite missions, and is the Project Manager for the AxiSEM3D seismic modelling code.