Wednesday 1 April 2015

Clean up the skies

We are all more or less familiar with the waste management systems. What happens with the garbage, where does it go etc.
What happens when people litter? The pieces of garbage are lying around on the ground until they are (hopefully) being picked up and taken to garbage area. We all know how nasty littered areas can be.
But have you ever thought about the space waste? What happens in the sky? There is no one to clean up the mess. 

Space junk creates risks and can cause serious damages to spaceships and satellites.


Surprisingly according to NASA an object as small as a baseball can be potentially threatening to the space stations.

Currently, the US Air force space command is tracking around 22000 man made pieces of junk in space. And thats only those, bigger than 10cm in diameter.

 At first, when people thought of threats of hitting objects out in space they would think about asteroids and comets. But nowadays, with the advanced development of satellite systems, the collision of satellites has been unavoidable and the pieces of remains are flying around freely, causing a snowball effect.

Kessler, a former Nasa scientist, has developed a theory that from 1966 to 1976 the amount of space junk was increasing by 13% each year!
Last year a US National Research Council study has figured out that current orbital waste has reached a ‘tipping point’ and there are more frequent collisions and spacecraft failures are more likely to happen.

Last year scientists came up with the idea for CleanSpace One.
It is a spacecraft intended to collect the junk in clusters. It will have up to eight arms that can wrap around pieces of debris.

Legally, every space objects/satellites are sovereign objects that belong to the countries that launched them. But formally, the law is not followed.
While the legal issues are still havent been sorted, the threat continues to grow.

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