Popular Science Writing Assignment: Space Junk Threat And Solution
886 Words4 Pages
Efecan Oral 11/11/15
Popular Science Writing Assignment
“Space Junk” Threat and Solution
We have been launching satellites for over 50 years now and like retired NASA senior scientist Donald Kessler said “We have lost control of the environment” already. As a result of the near 5000 launches of communication, weather forecast, television and navigation satellites since the start of the space age, result with the potentially damaging space debris that orbits Earth. Scientists estimate the total number of space debris objects in orbit to be around 29,000 for sizes larger than 10 centimeters, 670,000 larger than 1 centimeter and more than 170 million larger than 1 millimeter and like we learnt in the class as a result of their extreme momentum any of these objects can cause harm to all space vehicles, but particularly to the International Space Station, space shuttles and spacecraft with humans aboard. These objects are travelling at 27,000 kilometers per hour around our Earth in a form of free fall therefore even flecks of paint can cause an potential damage to space activities. After some serious incidents like the second flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger, a fleck of paint caused a serious problem for the shuttle, NASA started to track more than 22,000 objects larger than 5 centimeters wide. However they are millions of potentially dangerous space junks significantly smaller and harder to track. Also, these small objects are increasing with every