Space is getting crowded, with junk. Essential satellites delivering navigation, weather forecasts, the Internet and other services face this threat daily. Old rockets, decaying spacecraft and human operations in space leave behind orbital debris that increasingly threatens collisions, menacing a growing space economy. A decade ago the film Gravity dramatized the consequences of space pollution, with an avalanche of space junk sweeping across the sky to batter everything in orbit, including its astronaut hero. We haven’t done anything serious about it since then.
NASA defines space junk, or orbital debris, as “any human-made object in orbit that no longer serves a useful purpose, including spacecraft fragments and retired satellites.” A 2009 incident, when the U.S. communications satellite Iridium 33 collided with the defunct Russian military satellite Kosmos 2251, serves as a good reminder of its growing threat. That single collision created more than 2,200 pieces of new debris measuring over five centimeters in diameters, according to NASA.
More of these collisions are coming. In February an abandoned Russian satellite passed within about 20 meters of a NASA satellite. SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation alone carried out more than 25,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers from December 2022 to May 2023. And even on Earth, space junk is a problem, with a Florida home struck in March by a battery that fell from an International Space Station cargo mission.
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In space, debris comes from the frequent breakup of expended rocket bodies, explosion of satellites, dead satellites, collisions, paint flakes and even tools lost by astronauts. Around 85 percent of this debris resides within low-Earth…
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