Space Junk The Dangers of Polluting Earth's Orbit

Space Junk The Dangers of Polluting Earth's Orbit — page 5
Since the late 1950s humans have launched thousands of objects into space Some of them like these Japanese craft shown in an artist’s rendering entering the atmosphere over South Australia are designed to return to Earth Others will drift in space until gravity and other forces pull them down 1 ZOMBIES IN SPACE If we don’t change the way we operate in space all this results in an exponentially increasing amount of debris until all objects are reduced to a cloud of orbiting fragments that are capable of destroying any spacecraft that attempts to operate anywhere within that cloud Donald Kessler astrophysicist 2014 On February 10 2009 high above Earth two satellites slammed into each other Both satellites were traveling at nearly 17,000 miles 27,350 kilometers per hour when they crashed One of the satellites US communications satellite Iridium 33 had been going about its business As it orbited Earth 490 miles 790 km above the ground it relayed signals from one cell phone to another With no warning another satellite came barreling out of the dark Cosmos 2251 a Russian communications satellite had been launched into space in 1993 and had stopped operating two 6