“Space junk is junk in space, like in orbit around the earth. Pieces that break off of satellites, or the Space Station, or rocket boosters. Nuts, bolts, astronauts’ gloves.”
“Can any of it crash to Earth?”
…
“I don’t know,” I say honestly.
from Every Soul a Star
written by Wendy Mass
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2008
They say lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but what about space debris (junk, to you and me)? According to the European Space Agency (ESA) quoted in The Naples Daily News, there is less than a 1 in 100 billion chance that an individual human being will get hit…[in] any given year.
Space science, and NASA in particular, are full of acronyms and I just learned a new one: LEO. It stands for Low Earth Orbit. It has become an orbital space junkyard, literally. Millions of pieces of flying space junk are orbiting our Earth at up to 18,000 miles per hour. That’s faster than a speeding bullet, almost seven times faster.
Thousands of rockets and satellites used for television and radio transmission, internet access, and military operations surround us. And according to NASA, between 10 and 20 more are launched each year. At the end of their useful lives, the satellites continue to orbit. But they are useless, dead. Eventually, gravity will bring most of them back to Earth where they usually burn up as they plunge through our atmosphere. But not always. Sometimes they remain in space like the more than 34,000 objects slightly larger than a softball that are orbiting right now. That doesn’t sound like much but the total weight tops 9,000 metric tons (roughly, the weight of 10 American Bison or 10 full-grown Polar Bears).
The National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, a department of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) tracks between 200 and 400 objects every year. About an object a day enters Earth’s atmosphere. Every day. Most (they estimate about 70%) will fall into the ocean or in a sparsely populated region. And most of them do, so it’s a numbers game, essentially.
But don’t tell that to Alejandro Otero. He lives in Naples, Florida, and claims that last month (March, 2024) a 2-pound chunk of a lithium-ion battery crashed through his roof and two floors of his home, missing his young son by only one room.
About three years ago (January, 2021) astronauts aboard the International Space Station tossed a pallet of used batteries overboard to free up some room. Ars Technica reported that NASA had given the go-ahead after they determined the batteries would “harmlessly reenter the Earth’s atmosphere.”
This “harmless object” is in NASA’s hands now. The Naples Daily News reported on April 3, 2024, that NASA will analyze it at the Kennedy Space Center “to determine its origin.”
We’ll have to wait for their results.
In an article for the Natural History Museum (UK), we’re reassured that the greatest danger posed by all this space junk is not its risk to space exploration. It’s not even the chance of damage to humans on Earth, or our buildings, or our natural areas. Its greatest danger is collision with other satellites already in orbit. All satellites including the ISS, where human earthlings actually live, need to perform avoidance maneuvers to avoid being potentially damaged or destroyed due to a hit. Even the tiniest bit of debris, traveling at its extraordinarily high speed, can crack the windows on the ISS. Here's an article with an illustration of what all that junk looks like.
While no international laws control the amount or make-up of space junk, NASA developed the Orbital Debris Program in Houston at the Johnson Space Center in 1979. Scientists there are looking for ways to create less orbital debris while they track and remove the junk already orbiting. But it’s expensive. Some ideas involve magnets, some giant nets.
In a collaboration with a Japanese company, the US will launch a tiny biodegradable satellite. The wooden devise was built of magnolia wood. Experiments carried out on the ISS showed it is very stable and resistant to cracking. The point is to replace the metal being used now which contributes not only to the mass of space junk but also the chemical make up of our atmosphere that results from the burn caused during re-entry.
In experiments aboard the ISS, the wood did not suffer disintegration. There’s no oxygen in space to cause the wood to burn, and there are no living creatures to cause it to rot.
And even as LEO junk continues to orbit and continues to be a space hazard, we Earthlings have begun to leave litter, debris, trash, junk on the moon. And now we are exploring Mars.
Space junk is everyone’s problem and demands a solution that involves all players. Twenty countries currently have space programs. Some are more active than others, but all share the responsibility to at least keep the problem from getting worse.
The Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) has set up international guidelines, but, it is difficult and expensive to eliminate old spacecraft. Objects, especially the very small ones are hard to find and track and there is a huge amount of them. Then, there’s the issue of property rights. A country can’t dispose of a satellite or rocket that belongs to another country without their permission, even if it found and tracked.
I’m not finished with this topic; I am still learning how big a problem it is. I'll try for another post in time for Earth Day, April 22.
Thanks for listening!
I’m re-reading Rebecca by Daphne DeMurier (first American edition: Doubleday Doran and Company, 1938). The book has sold almost 3,00,000 copies and has never gone out of print. It won the National Book Award in 1938.
When a young, naïve employee visits Monte Carlo with her wealthy American employer, she is fascinated and charmed by Maxim de Winter, a wealthy English widower. They marry after a short courtship and move back to his home, Manderley. The narrator is unprepared for the social life she is thrust into and dominated by Maxim’s head housekeeper. It’s a Gothic mystery, a love story, and a young woman coming-of-age placed in a setting that feels alive, with characters that seem to live and breathe as they interact with each other.
Don’t miss this one.
It doesn’t happen often, but the Hitchcock film starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier is as good as the book. It won the Oscar for best picture in 1941.
Be curious! (and keep looking up)
“Can any of it crash to Earth?”
…
“I don’t know,” I say honestly.
from Every Soul a Star
written by Wendy Mass
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2008
They say lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but what about space debris (junk, to you and me)? According to the European Space Agency (ESA) quoted in The Naples Daily News, there is less than a 1 in 100 billion chance that an individual human being will get hit…[in] any given year.
Space science, and NASA in particular, are full of acronyms and I just learned a new one: LEO. It stands for Low Earth Orbit. It has become an orbital space junkyard, literally. Millions of pieces of flying space junk are orbiting our Earth at up to 18,000 miles per hour. That’s faster than a speeding bullet, almost seven times faster.
Thousands of rockets and satellites used for television and radio transmission, internet access, and military operations surround us. And according to NASA, between 10 and 20 more are launched each year. At the end of their useful lives, the satellites continue to orbit. But they are useless, dead. Eventually, gravity will bring most of them back to Earth where they usually burn up as they plunge through our atmosphere. But not always. Sometimes they remain in space like the more than 34,000 objects slightly larger than a softball that are orbiting right now. That doesn’t sound like much but the total weight tops 9,000 metric tons (roughly, the weight of 10 American Bison or 10 full-grown Polar Bears).
The National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, a department of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) tracks between 200 and 400 objects every year. About an object a day enters Earth’s atmosphere. Every day. Most (they estimate about 70%) will fall into the ocean or in a sparsely populated region. And most of them do, so it’s a numbers game, essentially.
But don’t tell that to Alejandro Otero. He lives in Naples, Florida, and claims that last month (March, 2024) a 2-pound chunk of a lithium-ion battery crashed through his roof and two floors of his home, missing his young son by only one room.
About three years ago (January, 2021) astronauts aboard the International Space Station tossed a pallet of used batteries overboard to free up some room. Ars Technica reported that NASA had given the go-ahead after they determined the batteries would “harmlessly reenter the Earth’s atmosphere.”
This “harmless object” is in NASA’s hands now. The Naples Daily News reported on April 3, 2024, that NASA will analyze it at the Kennedy Space Center “to determine its origin.”
We’ll have to wait for their results.
In an article for the Natural History Museum (UK), we’re reassured that the greatest danger posed by all this space junk is not its risk to space exploration. It’s not even the chance of damage to humans on Earth, or our buildings, or our natural areas. Its greatest danger is collision with other satellites already in orbit. All satellites including the ISS, where human earthlings actually live, need to perform avoidance maneuvers to avoid being potentially damaged or destroyed due to a hit. Even the tiniest bit of debris, traveling at its extraordinarily high speed, can crack the windows on the ISS. Here's an article with an illustration of what all that junk looks like.
While no international laws control the amount or make-up of space junk, NASA developed the Orbital Debris Program in Houston at the Johnson Space Center in 1979. Scientists there are looking for ways to create less orbital debris while they track and remove the junk already orbiting. But it’s expensive. Some ideas involve magnets, some giant nets.
In a collaboration with a Japanese company, the US will launch a tiny biodegradable satellite. The wooden devise was built of magnolia wood. Experiments carried out on the ISS showed it is very stable and resistant to cracking. The point is to replace the metal being used now which contributes not only to the mass of space junk but also the chemical make up of our atmosphere that results from the burn caused during re-entry.
In experiments aboard the ISS, the wood did not suffer disintegration. There’s no oxygen in space to cause the wood to burn, and there are no living creatures to cause it to rot.
And even as LEO junk continues to orbit and continues to be a space hazard, we Earthlings have begun to leave litter, debris, trash, junk on the moon. And now we are exploring Mars.
Space junk is everyone’s problem and demands a solution that involves all players. Twenty countries currently have space programs. Some are more active than others, but all share the responsibility to at least keep the problem from getting worse.
The Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) has set up international guidelines, but, it is difficult and expensive to eliminate old spacecraft. Objects, especially the very small ones are hard to find and track and there is a huge amount of them. Then, there’s the issue of property rights. A country can’t dispose of a satellite or rocket that belongs to another country without their permission, even if it found and tracked.
I’m not finished with this topic; I am still learning how big a problem it is. I'll try for another post in time for Earth Day, April 22.
Thanks for listening!
I’m re-reading Rebecca by Daphne DeMurier (first American edition: Doubleday Doran and Company, 1938). The book has sold almost 3,00,000 copies and has never gone out of print. It won the National Book Award in 1938.
When a young, naïve employee visits Monte Carlo with her wealthy American employer, she is fascinated and charmed by Maxim de Winter, a wealthy English widower. They marry after a short courtship and move back to his home, Manderley. The narrator is unprepared for the social life she is thrust into and dominated by Maxim’s head housekeeper. It’s a Gothic mystery, a love story, and a young woman coming-of-age placed in a setting that feels alive, with characters that seem to live and breathe as they interact with each other.
Don’t miss this one.
It doesn’t happen often, but the Hitchcock film starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier is as good as the book. It won the Oscar for best picture in 1941.
Be curious! (and keep looking up)
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