Recently, The European space agency warned that unchecked Spacee debris accumulation could lead to Kessler Syndrome , rendering space travel impossible in future. For decades, spacefaring nations have launched thousands of satellites and other objects into orbit, which have become vital to modern life. However, when these satellites age and stop functioning, ever wondered what happens to them?
According to NASA, many fragments or objects of these satellites remain in the ever-expanding space junkyard. These objects continue to float in the low-Earth orbit as they are too expensive to be removed. However, these pose severe threats to future satellites and crewed space missions.
Those incidents have included satellites that have accidentally collided with each other, rocket parts and spacecraft that have unexpectedly exploded, and weapons tests from nations including the United States, Russia, India and China that have spewed detritus across various altitudes in orbit.
Russia, for example, launched a missile at one of its own satellites as part of a weapons test in 2021, creating more than 1,500 traceable pieces of debris.
The last major accidental collision between two spaceborne objects occurred in February 2009 when a dead Russian military satellite, called Kosmos 2251, rammed into Iridium 33, an active communications satellite operated by US-based telecommunications firm Iridium. That event produced a massive cloud of nearly 2,000 pieces of debris that were nearly 4 inches (10 centimeters) in diameter and thousands of even smaller pieces.
Similar events on a smaller scale are also common: a US Air Force weather satellite, for example, broke apart in orbit on December 19, creating at least 50 new pieces of debris, LeoLabs, a company that tracks objects in space, said on Monday. It was only the latest in a string of four “fragmentation” events over the past few months that created more than 300 new pieces of litter.
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