An ever
increasing amount of space debris is orbiting earth. This can cause some
serious problems. ‘New tools are necessary to deal with more than hundred
thousands of space debris’ says Alexis Petit
in Advances in Space Research.
Space is a junkjard
Saving the future
 |
| All know space debris |
Space
debris is all the stuff that’s left behind by space missions. This can be
everything from tiny screws to whole rocket stages - and everything in between,
like a toolbox that was left behind by an astronaut while working on the ISS.
Although hitting a rocket stages doesn’t sound nice to anyone, tiny screws seem
less damaging. The problem is, they can cause your rocket quite some harm too.
Space debris orbits the earth with around twenty-eight thousand kilometres an
hour. This is faster than a bullet. A piece of space debris the size of a
marble would hit you with the force of a bowling ball going four-hundred eighty
kilometres an hour. For this reason,
NASA keeps track of all more than twenty-one thousand pieces of space debris.
But they estimate that there are more than hundred million pieces of space
debris, most of them smaller than one centimetre. If this amount is getting
more – and it is -, this might cause some serious problems.
Killed by a marble
For
example, cascade collisions can become a real problem if the amount of space
debris is going to increase even more. This means the amount of space debris is
so big that when two pieces collide, this only increases the risks of colliding.
Over time, this can mean that safe space programmes become impossible, because
there’s too much debris. Imagine if all we kept all the car wrecks on the high
way, at one point it would become impossible to drive there. In space, we’ve
almost reached that point. Six space agencies, among them the ESA and NASA,
predict catastrophic collisions with space debris happening every five or nine
years and an increase of thirty percent in space debris in the next two hundred
years.
Saving the future
Fortunately,
Alexis Petit and Anne Lemaitre have a solution. They want to improve the
software that NASA uses to track the space debris. With this improved software,
they are going to calculate which pieces of space debris are most likely to collide
with others. If we remove the pieces of space debris which are most likely to
collide, for example by letting them burn up in the atmosphere, the total
chances of collisions, and thus more space debris, decrease. We only remove the
car wrecks that lie in the middle of the high way, so other cars can pass
safely. This plan can give us a safer space and can keep space programmes
possible for many generations to come.
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