Wednesday July 23, 2008 at 22:33
Kudos to the European Space Agency for finding a way to graphically unmask the cloud of debris circling Earth. Like many problems, this one grew slowly over time
It started when the first man-made object reached orbit, the Soviet satellite Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957. Since then, more than 6,000 have followed. Fewer than 15 percent are operational today.
The dead satellites aren’t the main problem. It’s the ones that have blown up and the fragments of rocket bodies that booted them into orbit. In all, about 10,000 pieces of debris are being tracked by ground radar and optical telescopes, but it is the estimated 50,000 items too small for detection that are making the highways in space a hazard to travel
The speed is what kills. Flecks of paint just .33 mm in size have cracked windows on the space shuttle. That’s what happens when objects are traveling 17 times faster than machine gun bullets
China became the world’s most egregious contributor to space debris when it intentionally blew up a defunct weather satellite last year in a weapons test (so much for international treaties), boosting the amount of detectable space junk by 22 percent. (via Discovery News: Space Diary)
Obviously, the picture is not to scale.
