For how long will we continue to do damage to our environment; for how long will this madness continue? From time immemorial, man has been known to be concerned with only what benefits him from the environment but does little to protect same for long-term sustainability. We have been exploiting the earth without caring for it. For examples; we get our crude oil from earth to provide energy for our industries but find it difficult to tackle the problems of oil pillage which pollute our environment. We feast on fishes and other aquatic lives but turn around to channel industrial wastes into seas and rivers, which harm aquatic organisms.
As if this is not enough, man has taken his selfishness to outer space where he has launched thousands of objects in the past 50 years to better lives on earth but has done little to get rid of these objects when they break down and thus significantly contributing to what's known as space junk/debris. In this Part 1, we will robustly discuss the scale of the problem resulting from man's exploration activities in the outer space. The part 2 will talk about the current solutions being proposed to tackle this problem, which would surely bring the world to a standstill if nothing is done in this regard.
With that being said, space junk/debris is an assortment of different pieces of objects ranging from space exploration leftovers like nuts, spanners, bolts, gloves; chunks of busted up spacecrafts to derelict satellites and
space rocket stages.
NASA puts the number of this debris to be more than 100 million of which more than 500,000 pieces are trackable by space surveillance sensors, with more than 21000 said to measure up to 10cm. Some of this debris have been known to have fallen back to earth during which they could be burnt up in the atmosphere upon re-entry. One example of space debris which ended up falling back to Earth in April 1, 2018 and substantially burning up in the process is the first Chinese space station, Tiangong-1, which Chinese authorities were said to have lost contact with since 2016 and consequently could not guide ever since.
[Chinese Tiangong-1. Source: Flickr commons. Author: Kordite. CC BY-NC 2.0 licensed]
Like in the case of Chinese Tiangong-1, other space debris that re-enter earth's atmosphere neither pose a threat to life nor hinder space exploration activities because they are either burned up in the atmosphere or are guided to crash in the isolated area of pacific ocean known as space cemetery. However, problem results when space junk, instead of coming back to earth, stay up in various orbits, threatening the International Space Station (ISS), satellites, spacecrafts and future missions beyond earth's vicinity to such other places as asteroids, the moon, Mars, etc. Already, hundreds of thousands of these pieces are known to be currently orbiting the earth at dangerously high speed.
Even though space junk is said to be made up of small particles, as much as 21000 pieces have been found to measure up to 10cm. Now, things of that size moving at speed of 28,000 km/h the equivalent of 17500 mph (which is the minimum speed things in space must move at to overcome force of gravity) possess so much energy that, on collision, it is possible for a piece of bolt to destroy an entire satellite, or inflict a gargantuan damage to a space station.
As protective measures, the International Space Station (ISS) is fitted with over 100 anti-impact shields and also installed with Whipple Bumpers to ward off threats coming from objects traveling at between 3 to 18 km/s. Not leaving anything to chances, astronauts in ISS have to always hurry into emergency spacecrafts whenever debris of certain sizes are observed close to the space station. More so, the paths of spacecrafts moving to and fro ISS are highly monitored against space junk. As of today, only Russian Soyuz provides access for humans to get to and from the ISS.
Experts fear that as number of space junk continues to increase, so are chances of collision not only between individual space debris, but also among spacecrafts, space stations, satellites, etc until such a degree it would become impossible to neither launch objects into space nor embark on an expedition to explore the milky-way galaxy. More worrisome, again, is the fact that each episode of collision adds hundreds to thousands more pieces of debris to the ever increasing pool of space junk. This fact is well recorded in the following incidents:
In 1996, a French satellite was hit and damaged by debris from a French rocket that had exploded a decade earlier.
On Feb. 10, 2009, a defunct Russian satellite collided with and destroyed a functioning U.S. Iridium commercial satellite. The collision added more than 2,000 pieces of trackable debris to the inventory of space junk.
China's 2007 anti-satellite test, which used a missile to destroy an old weather satellite, added more than 3,000 pieces to the debris problem. ||Source
If this untidiness in space is ever allowed to degenerate to such an extent where it is impossible to use outer space orbits, then the world must be ready to live in a world devoid of weather forecasts, international phone connection, television signals and global position systems, amongst others, which would inevitably be adversely adversely affected.
So, the question is : How do we clean this ‘’space box’’ full of human made garbage?
The above question gives us the reason to return to this page for the concluding part of this article where I will be discussing various solutions being proposed to tackle this global problem as well as those already tested. Until then, thanks for reading this Part 1.
