![]() And Earth orbit hosts 128 million pieces of junk 0.04 inches to 0.4 inches (1 mm to 1 cm) in diameter, according to ESA. About 900,000 objects between 0.4 inches and 4 inches wide (1 to 10 cm) are whizzing around our planet, the European Space Agency estimates. Small debris is tough to track, and there's already a lot of it up there. "They can generate this other debris that's smaller." "That's all very worrying and is an additional reason why you want to remove these big objects from orbit," McDowell told. It's possible, McDowell said, that Object 48078 was knocked off the Zenit-2 rocket by a collision, so the March smashup may be part of a cascade. Our current space junk problem is not that severe, but the Yunhai event could be a warning sign of sorts. ![]() The world needs space junk standards, G7 nations agree Space junk removal is not going smoothly Who's going to fix the space junk problem? The nightmare scenario that satellite operators and exploration advocates want to avoid is the Kessler syndrome - a cascading series of collisions that could clutter Earth orbit with so much debris that our use of, and travel through, the final frontier is significantly hampered. We may reach that point in just a few years, he added. So, as the traffic density goes up, collisions are going to go from being a minor constituent of the space junk problem to being the major constituent. "That is to say, if you have 10 times as many satellites, you're going to get 100 times as many collisions. "Collisions are proportional to the square of the number of things in orbit," McDowell told. Humanity keeps launching more and more spacecraft, after all, at an ever-increasing pace. However, we may be entering an era of increasingly frequent space collisions - especially smashups like the Yunhai incident, in which a relatively small piece of debris wounds but doesn't kill a satellite. That smashup generated a whopping 1,800 pieces of trackable debris by the following October. McDowell described the incident as the first major confirmed orbital collision since February 2009, when the defunct Russian military spacecraft Kosmos-2251 slammed into Iridium 33, an operational communications satellite. Space Junk Clean Up: 7 Wild Ways to Destroy Orbital Debris Amateur radio trackers have continued to detect signals from the satellite, McDowell said, though it's unclear if Yunhai 1-02 can still do the job it was built to perform (whatever that may be). Thirty-seven debris objects spawned by the smashup have been detected to date, and there are likely others that remain untracked, he added.ĭespite the damage, Yunhai 1-02 apparently survived the violent encounter, which occurred at an altitude of 485 miles (780 kilometers). EDT (0741 GMT) on March 18, "exactly when 18SPCS reports Yunhai broke up," McDowell wrote in another tweet. ![]() Yunhai 1-02 and Object 48078 passed within 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) of each other - within the margin of error of the tracking system - at 3:41 a.m. Yunhai 1-02, which broke up on March 18, was "the obvious candidate," he added - and the data showed that it was indeed the victim. What did it hit?" McDowell wrote in another Saturday tweet. So the collision probably happened shortly after the epoch of the orbit. "I conclude that they probably only spotted it in the data after it collided with something, and that's why there's only one set of orbital data. Eight pieces of debris originating from that rocket have been tracked over the years, he said, but Object 48078 has just a single set of orbital data, which was collected in March of this year. McDowell found that Object 48078 is a small piece of space junk - likely a piece of debris between 4 inches and 20 inches wide (10 to 50 centimeters) - from the Zenit-2 rocket that launched Russia's Tselina-2 spy satellite in September 1996. ![]() He dove into the tracking data to learn more.
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