No Real-World Solutions Met During Special Meeting On Space Debris

Image Caption: Most orbital debris is in low Earth orbit, where the space station flies. Credit: NASA

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Humans have always been good at creating garbage. Just look around and you will find trash, junk and debris everywhere you go: landfills, waterways, city parks, neighborhood streets, forests and highways. While these are all hotbeds of man-made waste, one place in particular is increasingly becoming a huge threat to humanity and all you have to do is look up.

Space debris, or space junk, is a pressing problem for humanity both in space and on the ground. The problem is so relevant that a recent movie starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney has not only featured a devastating encounter in space but has also inspired politicians and government agencies to gather and discuss a real-world problem.

Space experts met Friday at a hearing held by the US House of Representatives to warn that space activities will become increasingly dangerous if rules are not developed to control the debris problem. Entitled Space Traffic Management: How to Prevent a Real Life Gravity, the hearing gave experts a chance to voice their concerns over the dangers of human space travel and commercial satellites that earthlings rely on for TV, communication and GPS.

While the meeting had its intentions in solving the space debris crisis, an endless array of bureaucracy kept any real-world solutions from taking place. Tight budgets, patchy international agreements, and partisan divides on Capitol Hill were the main issues keeping a clear route from taking shape.

SPACE COLLISIONS

In the film Gravity, a barrage of space debris threaten the livelihood of three astronauts who are on a spacewalk to maintain the International Space Station. In the opening scenes Sandra Bullocks and George Clooneys characters try to avoid the oncoming onslaught of junk that is raining down on them, destroying the space station, their craft and killing all those aboard.

While the movie is a fictional account, the physics behind it are all too real. The trail of space junk that affected the characters and their equipment in Gravity can probably best be described as part of the phenomenon known as Kessler syndrome. When two objects collide in orbit, they create more debris. Some of the debris created from these collisions burns up in the Earths upper atmosphere or falls to Earth. But what doesnt get eaten up by Earth continues to ride on orbit, potentially leading to more collisions, creating more debris and then creating more potential collisions, and so on and so forth; in space, this can be an indefinite routine.

NASA currently tracks about 23,000 objects in low-Earth orbit and as much as 500,000 pieces of junk drifting around space above at 17,000 mph, according to a report from Xinhuanet.

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No Real-World Solutions Met During Special Meeting On Space Debris