Space Debris 

By David M.

 

          Have you looked at space before? Did you know there are millions of pieces of space debris around Earth? Space debris is random junk like rocket fuel, paint flecks, and loads of other items all floating around Earth.

There are various causes to so much space debris such as governments and space companies. China made a major contribution to adding to space debris. One occasion being when China launched a missile at an old weather satellite; this in turn sent thousands of hunks of satellite around Earth. This may not sound like much, but these were adequately big pieces of debris, which means they can do catastrophic damage to any active satellite or space station.

Space debris duplicates in a sense. This is because when space debris collides with others it bursts into more pieces. The cycle of course continues. Another name for this is called “ Kessler Syndrome.” Kessler Syndrome is basically when there is an exceedingly vast amount of space debris because they keep colliding and producing more space debris at an exponential rate that we can’t go into space anymore, and major satellites become more space debris; every rocket, missile, or paint fleck we send in space gets hit by space debris, becoming more space debris. According to space.com, Donald Kessler says, “The 'Kessler Syndrome' was meant to describe the phenomenon that random collisions between objects large enough to catalogue would produce a hazard to spacecraft from small debris that is greater than the natural meteoroid environment."  This would imply that spacecrafts like satellites and such could be pelted with loads of space debris and therefore be futile to use.

You might be wondering, why are smaller pieces of space debris alarming? In space there is no gravity or any forces to slow it down, so it in turn rapidly accelerates. This leads to space debris usually getting to about 10 kilometers per second. You may also be wondering how humongous space debris is to be a critical size: around one centimeter. Of course, this is because of the acceleration of the debris. Space companies like NASA are keeping track of where the larger pieces of debris are in space, but they only have 22,000 pieces tracked. There are more 1 centimeter in diameter pieces than this. NASA tracks pieces of debris that are two inches in diameter and above.

Another question you may be asking is, why don’t we just get it all out of space? Scientists and engineers have tried making solutions for this; for example, there is Space Claw, also known as ClearSpace-1, which will capture and get rid of the Space Debris; it’ll be released in a couple of years. A couple more examples are Elsa-D and lasers. Elsa-D is meant for docking and taking inactive satellites back down. Lasers like the Laser-Orbital-Debris-Removal increase atmospheric drag, which means it slows space debris and makes space debris drop into the atmosphere to burn up.

Amazon and SpaceX announced that they would make and launch  thousands of satellites for communication like the internet and radio broadcasts. In the end, they’ll have put out tens of thousands of satellites; this will very much impinge on satellites in orbit. Satellites and space stations will most likely have to dodge satellites and random pieces of other junk once they do that. There are now megaconstellations going into orbit now too. A megaconstellation is basically just a bunch of satellites connected together. Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-palais said, "Satellite collisions would produce orbiting fragments, each of which would increase the probability of further collisions, leading to the growth of a belt of debris around the Earth." Now this means if satellites accidentally crash into each other once because of how many there are, it’d make more space debris, meaning it’d be a higher chance to hit another satellite, and so on, until we have a belt around Earth.

          Now you might ask why we just don’t wait for it all to crash down out of orbit and be diminished. This is because space debris can last many decades in space. By then it’d be too much to handle all the new space debris. People have come up with some sort of solution to it ,though, at least for trying to prevent space debris from becoming too much to handle for a while. If we launch satellite or rocket boosters early then we could prevent fuel and paint specks from getting into space. If we also get a handful of space debris out of space every year, that’d be a good way to stay out of the clear for a while more.

Space debris debris isn’t an entire danger to us really at all right now, but it is a threat to us advancing in space technology. Space exploration is good and all, but we need satellites, which are in orbit and can be hit by space debris, to use GPS, weather, television, radio, internet, and more. All these items are important for all sorts of uses. Science would be restricted in so many ways, and the world would be in chaos without satellites, but it would be in even more chaos without all the other space crafts that we use a bunch as well. Space debris isn’t just a threat to satellites. It’s a threat to all of our technology we’ve accomplished so far and can become a major problem if we don’t start fixing it.