Cosmic Garbage Collectors
Exploring Earth’s trash-filled orbit… and how to clean it up
Today, trash is everywhere. Landfill waste is trickling into water supplies. Oceans are filling up with plastics. Even the air is polluted with greenhouse gases.
Unfortunately, space is no exception.
Over 8,000 metric tons of space debris are orbiting around the Earth right now. The orbital velocities reach speeds up to ~33,000 miles per hour, over 10 times the speed of a bullet. As a result, even a collision with a tiny particle of paint can be damaging. For a spacecraft carrying human passengers, the implications of bigger collisions could be lethal.
Besides miniscule particles of debris, the whirlwind of space is also comprised of larger manmade space trash, such as discarded spacecraft or solid rocket motor discharge.
The biggest pieces of debris are tracked by the United States Space Surveillance Network, the SSN. Currently, the SSN has indexed over 27,000 pieces of space junk. One of the main contributors to the SSN index is satellite explosions and collisions.
When a pair of satellites run into each other, they create thousands of new pieces of debris. In anti-satellite tests, various countries, including the United States, have worsened the problem by launching…
