Landslide and lags are predicted: Earth's orbit is overflowing with debris from spent equipment
Kyiv • UNN
The amount of space debris in Earth's orbit is growing rapidly, which could lead to the destruction of satellites and the impossibility of using certain orbits. Active clearing of space is needed.
There is too much space debris in Earth orbit - parts and fragments of used equipment and spacecraft. This was evidenced by the annual report of the European Space Agency (ESA), reports UNN.
Details
According to the document, the amount of space debris is growing rapidly. In general, the number of satellites that no longer function and pieces of broken spacecraft critically exceeds the number of working satellites.
To date, monitoring programs track about 40,000 objects in near-Earth orbit, of which about 11,000 are active, operating satellites. The rest is scrap.
However, the estimated amount of debris around the planet is much larger. According to ESA data, there are approximately 54,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters in Earth's orbit. And debris of an even smaller caliber - from 1 to 10 centimeters - is approximately 1.2 million units.
There is also a "cloud" of debris ranging in size from 1 millimeter to 1 centimeter. There are almost 130 million particles of such waste near the Earth. And all this junk revolves around expensive satellites, on which navigation, weather forecasting and the Internet on Earth depend - at high speed.
As a result, analysts predict that the compaction of the space debris layer will lead to the launch of the "Kessler cascade" effect, when collisions between objects in near-Earth orbit will multiply the amount of debris. And this will significantly increase the risk of destruction of working devices due to collisions with debris.
This chain reaction could lead to certain levels of movement in orbit becoming dangerous and unusable over time.
The risk of collisions in near-Earth orbit continues to grow at an alarming rate. The effect will intensify if we continue the current rate of launches. However, it will grow even if we don't launch anything into Earth's orbit at all
This means that not adding new debris is no longer enough. Now the space debris environment needs to be actively cleaned, scientists emphasized.
Scientists have repeatedly warned that the rate at which humanity launches satellites into near-Earth orbit is unacceptable. After all, the process of removing satellites and rocket stages from near-Earth space with subsequent combustion in the atmosphere during return is a long one.
Let us remind you
At the beginning of this year, a metal hoop with a diameter of 2.4 meters from the upper stage of a space rocket weighing half a ton fell in a Kenyan village. There were no casualties, but the incident frightened local residents.