A strong warning from the 6th European Conference on Space Debris. The conference, hosted by the European Space Agency, offers scientists an opportunity to gather to assess the state of the problem of junk whirling around in space.
What they're trying to figure out are the odds of a "cascade" or chain-reaction in which space debris starts hammering satellites and other orbiting products, causing them to explode into clouds of ever more space debris until the debris reaches a critical mass at which it effectively takes down all our satellites and renders space unusable for years, possibly decades.
Since 1957, more than 4,900 space
launches have led to an on-orbit population today of more than 22,000
trackable objects, with sizes larger than 10 cm. Approximately 1,000 of
these are operational spacecraft. The remaining 94% are space debris,
i.e. objects which no longer serve any useful purpose. About 64% of the
routinely tracked objects are fragments from some 250 breakups, mainly
explosions and collisions of satellites or rocket bodies. In addition,
an estimated 700,000 objects larger than 1 cm and 170 million objects
larger than 1 mm are expected to be in Earth orbits.
Due
to relative orbital velocities of up 56,000 km/h, centimeter-sized
debris can seriously damage or disable an operational spacecraft, and
collisions with objects larger than 10 cm will lead to catastrophic
break-ups, releasing hazardous debris clouds of which some fragments can
cause further catastrophic collisions that may lead to an unstable
debris environment in some orbit regions (“Kessler syndrome”). Space
debris mitigation measures, if properly implemented by spacecraft
designers and mission operators, can curtail the growth rate of the
debris population. Active debris removal, however, has been shown to be
necessary to reverse the debris increase.
Our civilization has grown utterly dependent on space craft, mainly satellites, for everything from navigation (GPS) to all manner of tele-communications, early warning systems, weather and climate monitoring and, of course, the internet. Your bank machine doesn't work without satellite communication. Globalization itself would be nearly impossible to maintain without satellite access. Oh no, the cable TV! Break out the bunny ears.
In 2007 the Chinese tested an anti-satellite weapon, targeting a defunct low-orbit satellite. When it was hit it broke into about a thousand pieces of debris large enough to be identified from earth. It gave the Americans absolute fits.
We keep getting warned about this but we keep doing - squat. Time is simply not on our side but cleaning up the debris could be massively expensive and there aren't many governments lining up to throw money at the effort.
Typical human lack of forward thinking. Whether it be sending noxious gases into the atmosphere or sending metal into orbit, we just aren't thinking ahead. We really have to get our chops together.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeletePerhaps the concern is moot, Nasa says that we can eventually expect a huge coronal mass ejection from the sun that will fry all our electronics in space and earth bound. We harden none of our systems and would have no power to create the spares to create a new power system. We'll freeze and starve in the dark with no ability to rebuild before 80%+ of the population has perished. After that rebuilding will be entirely dependent on a pop that has lost many of its technical experts, infrastructure and central organization... and lets not forget to mention scores of reactors melting down.
on the bright side the pressure from the coronal mass ejection will push much of the space junk into decaying orbits cleaning the sky's for the radioactive racoons who will replace us as the alpha species
Happy Friday.
This is why I don't get invited to dinner parties much
Maybe we're genetically inclined to some Everest Effect. Droves of ambitious climbers with massive support operations seek the summit but no one can be bothered to deal with the corpses of dead climbers, some from generations past, until the place resembled a necropolis.
ReplyDeleteWe seem to obsess over minimizing input and maximizing return, offloading costs wherever possible. Now it rests with ordinary taxpayers to foot the bill for a clean up of orbital debris, not the institutions and corporations that pocketed the return from those launches over the years.