Blog Post

Space Pollution

Since the dawn of the space age in the 1950s, we have launched thousands of rockets and sent even more satellites into our planet’s orbit. Many are still there, and we face an ever-increasing risk of collision as we launch more.As long as humans have been exploring space, we've also been creating a bit of a mess. Orbiting our planet are thousands of dead satellites, along with bits of debris from all the rockets we've launched over the years. This could pose an issue one day.

Space junk, or space debris are pieces of machinery left by humans in space . It can refer to big objects such as dead satellites that have failed or been left in orbit at the end of their mission or smaller components detached from the rockets at different stages.

More than 27,000 pieces of orbital debris are currently being tracked by the Department of Defense’s global Space Surveillance Network (SSN) sensors. Debris may be small but are large enough to threaten human spaceflight and robotic missions. Since both the debris and spacecraft are traveling at extremely high speeds (about 15,700 mph in low Earth orbit), an impact of even a tiny piece of orbital debris with a spacecraft could create big problems.

The United Nations has asked all companies to remove their satellites from orbit within 25 years after the end of their missions. Tackling solutions for this issue has become a very important issue recently. Some of the suggested methods include the removal of dead satellites from orbit and dragging them back into the atmosphere, where they will burn up. Ways we could do this include using a harpoon to grab a satellite, catching it in a huge net, using magnets to grab it, or even firing lasers to heat up the satellite, increasing its atmospheric drag so that it falls out of orbit.

Not only have we left a lot of space junk in Earth's orbit, there are objects elsewhere too, such as on the lunar or martian surfaces. Some satellites were abandoned on the the surfaces and in the orbits of other planets of our solar system. We must limit space pollution during space expeditions. We cant keep polluting every place we can step foot on.

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