Space Debris Around Earth Might Trap Us Inside the Planet

Over the past few months, people have captured footage of space debris burning up in our atmosphere. While certainly startling, the truth is, there’s been a lot of junk up there for a long time and so far no one has been hurt here on Earth.

Since the first satellite went into orbit — the Soviet Union’s Sputnik, launched on Oct. 4, 1957 — we have steadily increased the amount of objects encircling our small planet.

And it’s not just satellites. When speaking of space debris, agencies are specifically referring to inactive, human-made objects that orbit the Earth.

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), which estimates that there are about 23,000 objects from roughly 5,000 launches (as of 2012), about 65 per cent of the objects they have catalogued are as a result of 250 break-ups in orbit about 10 collisions.

Shockingly, most of those fragments came from a Chinese anti-satellite test that targeted the Feng Yun-1C weather satellite in 2007 which created more than 3,300 pieces of debris. In February 2009, an additional 2,200 fragments were created by the first accidental collision between two satellites, Iridium-33 and Kosmos-2251.

About 20 percent of the objects are satellites (with fewer than 1/3 operational) and another 17 per cent are used rocket bodies and other objects from space missions. The remainder is debris from fragmentation.

According to ESA, if there is a collision at a speed of about 10 km/s in low-orbit by anything larger than 10 cm, it is considered “catastrophic.” And in space, catastrophic means the destruction of your spacecraft.

Collisions create something called the Kessler Syndrome where it becomes a cascading effect: debris creates more debris which creates more and on and on it goes. Anything larger than 1 cm can damage or destroy satellites. Millimetre-sized objects could disable the systems of a satellite.

But as we continually launch more and more into space, it’s clear that we can’t continue this process forever.

At the end of the year, European organizations are gathering to discuss the mitigation and removal of space debris, which may help reduce any further risk to astronauts or inhabitants here on the ground, in case our luck runs out.