The Final Frontier...

I read this in the Daily Mail a few weeks ago and it still blows my mind. Not only that but the world's space junk is monitored (on behalf of the world) here in Yorkshire. I think that's pretty cool!


The final frontier teeming with man-made rubbish:
The incredible pictures of 'space junk' swirling round Earth's orbit
By MICHAEL HANLON

Not only our atmosphere and oceans are being polluted by billions of pieces of junk.
As these computer-generated images show, Mankind's seemingly insatiable desire to litter has now extended out into space, with potentially devastating results.

Rocket scientists call it 'orbital debris'; everyone else calls it space junk. And it is becoming a problem.


The computer-generated images show the mass of swirling debris that has formed around the Earth.

We put our first object into space just 51 years ago - Sputnik One.

But in just half a century we have created a swarm of perhaps tens of millions of items of debris, all circling around the planet - rubbish through which the 600-odd operating satellites, one space station, one space telescope, an occasional space shuttle, interplanetary probe and Soyuz rockets have to negotiate a safe passage.

As the images show, these form distinct rings and spheres around Earth.

Most hug close to the surface, 200-300 miles up in low-earth-orbit, where they pose a potentially deadly hazard to astronauts and their spacecraft before they burn up in the atmosphere, usually a few months later.

About 50 per cent of all trackable objects are due to in-orbit explosion events or collisions.

Millions more swing round in 'geostationary' orbits, more than 20,000 miles up where they remain.

The debris consists of derelict spacecraft and dead satellites, bits of rocket casing, pieces of metal ejected during collisions and docking procedures, nuts and bolts, dropped tools, frozen lumps of rocket fuel and human waste material from manned spacecraft.

In 1965, during the first U.S. space walk, the Gemini 4 astronaut Edward White, lost a glove.
For a month, the glove stayed on orbit at a speed of 17,500mph, becoming the most dangerous garment in history until it burnt up in the atmosphere a few months later.

The geostationary ring, at an altitude of about 36 000 km. This orbit is heavily used by telecommunication satellites.

The Russian Mir space station generated more than 200 plastic bags of rubbish, simply thrown into space. And in 1994, when a Pegasus unmanned rocket blew up, it created more than 300,000 fragments more than an eighth of an inch across.

Amazingly, Nasa and other agencies have catalogued much of this debris, piece by piece. Objects as small as a tenth of an inch or so can be tracked by the radar of the U.S. Space Surveillance Network.

Space junk is important because it is so deadly. Even tiny flecks of paint are travelling fast enough - tens of thousands of miles an hour - that should they hit the International Space Station, for example, they could easily put a dent in the skin or even crack a window.

If the tiniest nut or bolt were to collide with a space-walking astronaut, it would kill him or her instantly.


The number of objects in Earth orbit has increased steadily - by two hundred per year on average

Whenever a space shuttle is in orbit, the Surveillance Network regularly examines the trajectories of known orbital debris to identify possible close encounters.

If another object is projected to come within a few miles of the space shuttle, it will normally manoeuvre away from the object if the chance of a collision exceeds one in 10,000.

This occurs infrequently, about once every year or two.

Perhaps surprisingly, harmful collisions between space junk and operating spacecraft have been rare.

Modern spacecraft are equipped with shields which can deflect objects measuring up to half an inch or so across.

Fortunately space is very, very big and the spaces between all these bits of junk remain large, and the probability of a hit very small.

But it is only a matter of time before an accident occurs. Sadly, cleaning up space is going to be a lot harder than clearing up litter down here on Earth.