Space Junk: A Threat To Human Spaceflights

Since the first satellite launch

Since the first satellite launch (Sputnik 1) in 1957, thousands of space probes, satellites and telescopes have been sent into space. Just as we have created rubbish mountains on Earth, we’ve also accumulated a blanket of junk around the Earth.
Debris around the Earth. (credit: ESA)
In 2008 – when ESA (European Space Agency) published the image above, showing how much trash there was in orbit – this subject became a concern to many countries around the world. Seven years ago, two American researchers, Donald Kessler and Philip Anz-Meador, said that by 2020 it might be not possible to perform space operations near the Earth.
Today, our planet is surrounded by around 50 thousand objects, but less than 7 thousand of these are more than 20 centimetres in size. It means, these objects are, in fact, debris of our spacecraft rather than natural moons\captured asteroids. Although most of the debris in Earth Orbit is small, it’s travelling extremely fast. Below altitudes of 2,000 km, the average relative impact speed is 36,000kmph (or 21,600 mph). A crash involving even one piece can be a major disaster.
In an attempt to solve this problem, the United States ...