And there have been collisions, most famously in 2009 when an active communications satellite was hit by a derelict Russian military one, and many smaller-scale ones. Geer says that in the UK, a team of military and civilian analysts are tracking debris using radar and telescopes, and have to warn British satellite operators about 1,500 times a month that they’re at risk of collision, so they can get out of the way. But, says Pollacco, “the Americans have done it, the Chinese have done it, the Indians.”Īs a result, there are near misses every day. Russia famously did it last year, creating a cloud of satellite-bits. There are thousands of tonnes of old boosters sitting in orbit, just dumped, full of fuel, and sometimes they have a collision or explode and create more debris.”Įven worse, every so often a country blows up a satellite with a missile to show off its military prowess. Nowadays rocket boosters are given less energy so they fall back to Earth, but in the past, “those boosters went into orbit. “We think space is infinite, so historically we haven’t cared about it that much,” says Pollacco. It is not at all unusual for space junk to crash into the moon (Photo: Florian Gaertner/Photothek/Getty) And the other is that the number of pieces of debris in orbit is going up too, as bigger bits fragment. The British space company OneWeb is launching 30 or more microsatellites every month Musk’s Starlink satellites are going up at a rate of 50 or so a month. One is that the number of satellites goes up monthly. A head-on collision at a closing speed of 50,000mph would be “like a grenade”. “Even a piece of debris 1cm across could destroy a satellite,” says Don Pollacco, director of Warwick University’s Centre for Space Domain Awareness. As well as huge chunks like the old Chinese rocket booster, Nasa estimates that there are 23,000 the size of a softball or larger, but half a million the size of a marble, and hundreds of millions of tiny ones a bit larger than a grain of sand.Īnd because each of them is travelling at around 25,000mph, even the smallest can be devastating. Unfortunately, as well as those 5,000 or so working satellites, there are also millions of pieces of debris. An awful lot of modern life involves satellite data.” Modern life increasingly depends on satellite data for phones, cars, communications and banking (Photo: Richard Baker/In Pictures/Getty) “They provide navigation for phones and cars, communications, banking. “There are probably 5,000 working satellites in orbit right now,” says Jacob Geer, head of space surveillance and tracking at the UK Space Agency. The fundamental point is that putting things in space is important.
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