Caption: View of Earth from the International Space Station. Image courtesy of Pixy.org.
By Siona Ahuja ’24
Staff Writer
On Sept. 23, 2020, Jim Bridenstine, head of NASA, tweeted, “Debris is getting worse!” referring to floating junk particles in space, a majority of which lie in the lower Earth orbit. His tweet also mentioned that, throughout 2020, the International Space Station was maneuvered thrice to avoid any collision with the debris moving 18,000 miles per hour.
This phenomenon is not uncommon. In fact, the first instance of space junk can be traced back to the first satellite in space. In 1957, the Russian satellite Sputnik I deorbited within three months of its launch and landed back on Earth. Not only did this commemorate the beginning of the Space Age, but it also heralded the adverse effects of human interference in space.
Two satellite collisions, one deliberate and one accidental, have led to the amassing of almost 70 percent of debris in Earth’s orbit, posing dangers for satellites.
China launched an anti-satellite test in 2007 to destroy the weather satellite Fengyun 1-C, which had been orbiting the Earth since 1999. Its fragmentation into almost 950 pieces led to growing worldwide concern about space debris.
In February 2009, two communications satellites, Iridium 33 from the United States and Kosmos-2251 from Russia, faced an accidental collision. The exceptionally high speed of both satellites split them into hundreds of pieces, greatly spiking the amount of waste matter in the LEO. While some of the debris burnt up in a few years, much of it is likely still floating in Earth’s orbit, endangering other intact spacecraft and satellites.
Despite minuscule sizes, space debris is largely untraceable and moves at extremely high speeds. Even something as small as a fleck of paint can punch a hole in a rocket, leading to deaths, lost research and financial deficits.
Holger Krag, head of the European Space Agency’s Space Safety Programme, stated, “The biggest contributor to the current space debris problem is explosions in orbit, caused by left-over energy — fuel and batteries — onboard spacecraft and rockets. Despite measures being in place for years to prevent this, we see no decline in the number of such events.”
International standards are slowly being created for bettering practices to avoid creating more space debris. Some of them include creating “collision avoidance maneuvers,” moving defunct satellites out of the way of working ones and sending them to “graveyard orbits” (orbits that lie away from common operational paths) and designing spacecrafts that minimize “shedding,” or materials that detach during launch.
As space junk becomes an ever-increasing issue, many governmental agencies and private companies are taking strides to tackle it through various measures. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has partnered with Astroscale, a private Japanese company specializing in orbital debris removal. It is testing a 2,300-foot-long whip that intends to knock debris out of orbit into Earth’s atmosphere, where it is likely to burn up.
Similarly, Elon Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, is launching a rocket-spaceship duo named Starship, which aims to transport humans to Mars. During an online interview with Time magazine, Gwynne Shotwell, chief operating officer of SpaceX, said that “it’s quite possible that we could leverage Starship to … go pick up some of this junk in outer space.”
Increasing human activity in outer space calls for improved sustainability outside the realm of the Earth. NASA scientists believe that space junk is not just one country’s responsibility, but that of every spacefaring nation.