GROWING PROBLEM OF SPACE JUNKby Meghana Fessy | 26-04-2020 00:33 |
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 If you¡¯ve ever left your house uncleaned for more than a few weeks, you know how much dirt and debris can gather in the corners, tolerable only for so long. Once the dust bunnies begin organizing their own unions, you inevitably drag out the vacuum and get your house back in order. Now, imagine if you let thousands of tons of garbage pile up over the course of decades¡¦ it would be a pretty difficult mess to clean up! While thousands of tons of garbage probably won¡¯t build up in your family room, the same can¡¯t be said about outer space. When you look up at the stars, you won¡¯t see the hundreds of thousands of pieces of space junk and debris circling the planet, but it¡¯s out there! Most space junk comes from orbiting satellites and the rockets that shot them into place. Gradual wear and tear or sudden collisions cause these to disintegrate into tiny fragments that continue to orbit at tens of thousands of kilometres an hour. Some composite metals and polymers actually consume ozone when they push back through the atmosphere and burn up, experiencing chemical reactions that produce nitric oxide, which can deplete ozone. Additionally, climate change may not be experiencing a major impact from space debris, but the atmosphere around our planet is ¡°tightening¡± in a sense, as a result of climate change. This means that the upper layers of the atmosphere are thinning out, which reduces the amount of friction between objects—the force that slows space debris and drags it out of orbit. In short, this means that there is less debris falling, by percentage, leaving more of it to fling dangerously around in space for even longer amounts of time—decades and even centuries. Even though the presence of space debris doesn¡¯t pose an immediate threat to our terrestrial environment, we cannot ignore the impact it is having on the astral environment. |
