Space Junk Menace: New Guidelines Urged to Help Fight Orbital Debris Threat by Ethan Haessig
https://www.space.com/space-junk-threat-satellites-guidelines-reduce-orbital-debris.html
The article is about the amount of debris we have floating around in space and the potential dangers that it poses and what we should do about it. Right now we have about 2,000 satellites around earth for many different reasons and that number is continuously rising. With this many satellites accidents do happen which can cause mass amounts of money lost and danger if the pieces fall back into earth’s atmosphere and hit the ground in a city, on a person, or anywhere else dangerous. For example February 2009 an active US satellite collided with an inactive russian satellite creating more than 1,800 pieces of debris. This debris is travelling at the speed of a bullet and can cause microscopic-or even larger- holes in satellites and even manned spacecraft, causing immediate danger to people inside those spacecrafts. To prevent this the SSC which is a newly formed organization of space-industry stockholders laid out some new guidelines on how we can fix this. One of the new guidelines proposed is that all spacecraft and satellites have a propulsion system to avoid potential collisions from happening. Another potential guideline that was proposed was that they send these small spacecrafts that will go into our orbit and sort of “sweep” it and clean up some of the debris. The Kessler syndrome is a theory that after one collision between satellites or spacecraft in our orbit another collision may result from the first collision causing a sort of domino effect and thus causing a large area of orbit to be rendered unusable.
What other dangers does space debris have?
What do you think we should do to fix the problem?
How does this impact us as everyday people?
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