Space Junk has increased significantly in recent years
Shortly before Christmas, a US Air Force weather satellite shattered into 50 pieces: one of four recent ‘fragmentation’ events in orbit that have experts raising the alarm about the so called ‘Kessler Syndrome’.
Named after American astrophysicist Donald Kessler — who first warned of its risks in 1978 — Kessler Syndrome basically describes a ‘space junk’ chain reaction in which hardware smashing into each other in orbit creates runaway destruction.
Bits of broken satellites, the remains of booster rockets, wreckage from weapons tests and even objects as simple as a loose screw off a space capsule all contribute to the over 130 million estimated pieces of space junk which now orbit the Earth.
The vast majority is between 0.4 to 0.04 inches long but approximately 40,500 pieces of that debris are greater than four inches, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).
The ‘space junk’ is moving extremely fast, buzzing Earth at around 18,000 mph or nearly seven times faster than a speeding bullet, according to Nasa.
While there has only been 650 major collision accidents since 1957, ‘the number of objects in space that we have launched in the last four years has increased exponentially,’ according to planetary scientist Vishnu Reddy.
Reddy said: “We are heading towards the situation that we are always dreading.”
Meanwhile, Dan Baker, the director of the University of Colorado’s Atmospheric and Space Physics lab said: “Unless we do something, we are in imminent danger of making a whole part of our Earth environment unusable.”
The frequency of space launches has skyrocketed this decade, fueled by the rise of private space firms and a new race to the moon.
There’s been an average of 82 launches annually from 2008 to 2017 climbing to 133 launches-per-year from 2018 onward.
Right now, in low-Earth orbit (LEO), about 1,000 collision warnings are issued daily to alert telecoms, governments, scientists and others about the risks to their hardware.
These alerts happen to reside at the orbital altitude where Elon Musk has launched over 7,000 of SpaceX’s Starling internet satellites.
According to Reddy, a professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, the risk of catastrophic space junk is worse at higher and more stable ‘geosynchronous orbits.’
While debris in lower orbits, like LEO, will naturally fall back to Earth and often burn up harmlessly in time, unwanted and dangerous trash in GEO can remain in orbit literally for millennia — increasing the risk of dangerous high-speed collisions in that orbit.
Some fear that the onset of ‘Kessler Syndrome’ might be a slow-motion train wreck, where the orbital billiard balls are already in motion, even if humanity somehow halted all of its space programs, public and private, foreign and domestic.
Kessler’s original 1978 thought experiment proposed a scenario where the current inertia of space junk collisions, perhaps too tiny to be tracked from Earth today, are slowly building momentum — adding more and more projectile debris into the system.
It is feared that the data may not be accurate enough to avoid a collision.
