Essay On Space Junk

Results

The internet research gave a lot of relevant information, which was applied to the research paper and was described in Results section.

Research question 1: What are the main causes of this issue?

It is well known that every problem has its causes, which demonstrate how this or that issue can be developed subsequently. And following this fact, according to the Space.com website ever year different countries send their space satellites to investigate space to develop its space science, while other old versions that were sent many years ago stay on orbit and become useless. That is why the amount of space junk increases with geometric progression every day (“Orbital debris is a serious problem for space flight”, par 2).

Another confirmation

Statistics from Energy Fresh web site, par 3.

Research question 3: What are the dangers of space junk?

Space junk fragments represent the objects travelling at extremely fast speed, about 8 kilometers per second. If even a very small piece of debris hits a satellite, spacecraft or astronaut at that speed, it could be very serious damage and accident: it can kill an organism or split and explore big satellites and other space machines.

Moreover, without taking into account the collision and accident, space junk carry the danger of pieces falling back to Earth. If the fragment or satellite is not so big, located beyond the edge of the atmosphere it will reduce speed of falling or burn up in the atmosphere before collision with Earth’s surface. However, big problem carry more massive satellites or its pieces. If they land in cities or other inhabited locality there will be quite big damage, even death. As an example, in 2007 one piece that was re-entered nearly knocked the Chilean aircraft (University of Toronto, par 3-4). Also, the biggest impact that Earth’s surface had was in 1978 when the radioactive fragments of the Soviet satellite "Cosmos-954" strewn with a length of almost 600 kilometers north-west part of Canada (Karash, par