Closure of 8th European Conference on Space Debris

It is my great pleasure to report on the closure of the 8th European Conference on Space Debris today.

The 4 day conference has been attended by 570 registered participants from nearly 50 countries, and the packed agenda had 143 oral talks in two parallel streams, as well as 119 posters presented in a new virtual format. These are record numbers.

The opening session on Tuesday saw remarks by new ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher, ESA Director of Operations Rolf Densing, and a keynote by Holger Krag leading ESA's Space Safety Programme on ESA's response to the space debris problem. We also released our new space debris movie "Time to Act".

Stay tuned for an event summary coming soon and all presented papers published to ESA Space Debris Conference Proceedings . Registered participants shall receive access to all pre-recorded oral presentations early next week.

Thank you to a great team making this unique (and record!) conference possible! Kudos to my team at ESA for supporting an exciting week, and especially thanks to our organiser and host Genius GmbH. It has been an honour to experience outstanding enthusiasm and dedication under the current difficult conditions.