By Michelle Nguyen
It was collision of two specks in the sky.
With each hurtling at 35,000 km per hour into one another only to crash and shatter into a thousand pieces. The spectacular crash scattered broken fragments and shrapnel some 800 km above our heads. One of the specks went silent.
We lost contact with the once active U.S.-based communication satellite Iridium 33. This accidental collision in 2009 with the already inactive Russian Cosmos 2251, was the first time we knew about satellites colliding in space. It was a confronting wakeup call about the issue of space junk.
It wasn’t the last either, since January, 2020 saw a near miss between two large satellites.
Much of the 2009 wreckage still remains in orbit around Earth. Until the fractured parts completely disintegrate, they will stubbornly smash into each other again and again. Meanwhile, swimming above the clouds and just out of sight lies the other million pieces of space junk. The Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is so polluted that it is renowned as a graveyard. It mostly consists of human-generated objects such as parts of spacecraft and rockets, inactive satellites and even tiny flecks of paint from spacecraft.
According to the European Space Agency, in 2019 there was over 5,000 objects spanning over 1 m in size and an overwhelming 130 MILLION fragments of about 1 mm. Along with the deliberate destruction of Chinese Fengyun-1C spacecraft in 2007, the 2009 collision has magnified the large orbital debris population in LEO by about 70%!
Space junk can’t be much of problem when most of it is smaller than a fingernail, right? Well, most space debris can travel at EXHILARATING speeds. The impact of pea-size fleck of paint can be as powerful as a plasma gun! (which can puncture solid metal…) Space debris can whirl at up to 18,000 miles per hour, which is almost 7 times faster than a bullet.
While surviving space establishments brandish their bruises and fractures, about a handful of satellites, telescopes and space objects are lost yearly. This might not sound like much, but since debris from one collision can trigger a chain reaction of further destruction this is quite alarming. A single bullet of impact is capable of offsetting a chaotic cycle worthy of multiple machine guns.
This could be harmful to people in both space and on Earth. Also losing all of our satellites means we may have to resort back to 1970s technology: a time before the internet, GPS and modern weather and natural disaster forecasting. We may have also created our own prison. In the future, it might be dangerous to launch anything into space. We would be grounded from space travel, future explorations and a potential interspace existence.
While this situation seems a little over our heads… Don’t fret, innovators are coming up with solutions. Here’s a list of some ideas:
The CLAWWW; which operates just like how claw-machines collect plush animals
Harpoons; which works like spear fishing.
Magnetism; which could be a safer option since space fragments are less likely further fragment when they’re just dragged along a new path using magnets.
Lasers (pew pew); to shoot space junk out of a collision pathway.
Recyclable rockets; could be a more sustainable option to traditional disposable boosters.
While these concepts still need more time to develop, but for now who knows if space rubbish collector could be one of coolest jobs in the future.
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