Satellite waste

Saturday night was spent with a bunch of wonderful mostly norwegians, partying, chatting, eating and drinking. Of the many other interesting encounters, two stood out. One about the different types of drugs one can take and the after-affects of each described quite vividly, followed by a round of who had tried what and not.

The second, was a rather interesting monologue delivered by a guy working with satellite technology. Monologue, because once we got him started he just went on and on, but we hung on each word, the wannabe-space-junkies that we were that night. Did you know there are currently approximately over 19000 + man made satellites orbiting earth?? and that many are just debri, with no fuel, pushed further away and just hanging about in space. A satellite wasteland.

So my selective memory from Saturday night retained some information when I awakened the morning after, and I did some research:

Artificial orbital debris, consists of the leftovers from humanity’s activities in Earth orbit. Every time we put a satellite into space, we end up leaving something behind in Earth orbit. At the very least this is the satellite itself and often times also includes one or more rocket stages and bits of miscellaneous stuff, like explosive bolts, lens caps, and solid rocket exhaust particles. Sometimes these leftover bits themselves shed more pieces through what are called fragmentation events. These events can be minor (a few dozen pieces) to extreme (explosions creating more than a thousand pieces). Within this category of artificial objects we define three basic populations: the trackable, the potentially trackable, and the untrackable.

Trackable: Greater than 10 cm in diameter, Estimated Population: 19,000+
Potentially Trackable: Greater than 1 cm in diameter, Estimated population: Several hundred thousand
Untrackable: Less than 1 cm in diameter, Estimated Population: Many millions to billions

Eat that.

So not only are we polluting the earth we live on we are also doing the same some thousand miles above us. Amazing.