Earth’s Orbit Is Full of Hidden Space Junk, and Some of It Could Threaten Modern Life
· Vice
According to new research from the University of Warwick, there may be a hidden “minefield” of space junk orbiting our planet that researchers are only now beginning to detect.
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It’s no secret that all the junk accumulating just outside the reaches of our planet is becoming a growing problem. With the explosion in rocket launches as governments and private companies race to fill Earth’s orbit with every gadget and gizmo imaginable—from GPS satellites to communications relays—a lot of that hardware eventually dies up there. Sometimes it collides, shattering into clouds of debris that whip through space at thousands of miles per hour. Scientists have been tracking that growing hazard for years.
The study focused on geosynchronous orbit, roughly 22,000 miles above Earth’s equator, where all the satellites that keep our modern world chugging along reside. Communications, TV signals, GPS navigation, weather forecasting. All the satellites that run the world orbit the Earth are being threatened by small fragments of broken or abandoned spacecraft that are incredibly difficult to spot. And with no atmosphere to drag the debris down, they’ll just float up there, possibly for generations.
Researchers Say Earth’s Orbit May Be Hiding Far More Space Junk Than We Realized
While there are plenty of research teams out there coming up with methods of cleaning up all that space junk, there’s still the pesky matter of swarms of space junk that we may not be able to see even with our finest imaging technologies. The team from the University of Warwick developed imaging processing software and a technique called blind stacking to reanalyze old telescope data and found 25 previously undetected debris tracks, including fragments as small as 2 inches across. Nearly 80 percent of those objects weren’t listed in any public catalog, suggesting that there may be way, way more unseen debris out there than experts realized.
It doesn’t sound like much, but even a little scrap of metal two inches across could cause a huge problem for an astronaut crew or scientists aboard the International Space Station, as these little scraps of metal were traveling at speeds that could tear through a hull or, at the very least, cause serious damage. And not just to the craft, but they can also do some damage to a GPS navigation satellite or any of those other weather forecasting satellites out there.
We have rapidly become dependent on our space-based infrastructure, and as such, we should probably care just a bit more about how we’ve created a hostile environment for all the technology we rely on.
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