The Bell Nucleus 2017-2018 BN Jan 2018 Issue | Page 22

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Low-Earth orbit travel is necessary but it is becoming more and more difficult for astronauts
to steer clear of all the space junk. It is not just the ordinary trash that we see here on Earth
but a piece of spacecraft traveling at around 17,500 miles per hour. This is enough to damage
any satellite. For this reason, countries are joining forces to confront the growing issue of
space waste.
As of right now, there are millions of tiny ellite collisions include a thirty-one year old
pieces of space waste that orbit the Earth, U.S. rocket body that collided with a CZ-4
with about 500,000 of them are the size of a Chinese launch vehicle in March 2000. A
marble or larger and around 20,000 larger more recent one occurred on February 11,
than a softball. Debris in the low-earth orbital 2009 when a U.S. communications owned by
travels at extremely high speeds and can se- Iridium collided with a non-functioning Rus-
verely damage any kind of spacecraft out sian satellite, creating even more debris
there. You may ask yourself where all this which poses a danger to other satellites still
comes from. There are two kinds of space de- intact. A report by the National Research
bris; one is formed by colliding satellites and Council in 2011 said that collisions like the
the other comes naturally through meteor- one in 2009 would be more common in the
oids. As more collisions occur between debris future because of the rapidly increasing
and satellites, there is more space debris amount of debris.
formed and it is more of a chain reaction be- The big setback on getting the low-earth orbit
tween debris. All this trash pollutes the low- clean is that many nations can’t agree on a
earth orbit and, if not stopped, will make method to clean up space. No country alone
space travel or activity in the low-earth orbit wants to take up the burden of such a task.
impossible. What many scientist and astro- Economists have proposed a solution. It is
nauts worry about is a scenario where there that countries should impose taxes whenever
are so many collisions that it becomes almost they need to place a new object in outer
impossible to clean and there would be so
space. This would discourage excessive
much debris flying around that would destroy launches since they would need to pay extra
satellites and create even more debris. The
money, therefore placing a limit on how much
“Kessler Syndrome” describes this scenario.
Travel in the low-earth orbit is a necessity be-
cause many nations depend on their satellites
for surveillance, communication, research,
and exploration. A couple of examples of sat-
22 | THE BELL NUCLEUS
spacecraft can be sent out in space.
How is this issue being dealt with as of now?
NASA has made a machine called the Orbital
Debris Engineering Model (ORDEM2000) to
give a description on the orbital debris in the