Guest Author - Violette DeSantis

While the planet earth has struggled with its problems of global warming and trying to build a greener future a new problem is in our future. The problem is space junk. Garbage is not just a problem for us on earth; it is a problem for us in space.

Early in 2009 there was a satellite collision between U. S. and Russian satellites. Unlike traffic on earth that is regulated by traffic signs and signals, space is unregulated. It is possible that this event may cause the governments on earth to write some rules for space.

There are many concerns surrounding the space satellite collision. One of course is the danger of it happening again. What if we are talking manned space satellites? The other major concern is the debris that is left behind after a space collision. We might think that perhaps the junk from such a collision is similar to a train collision on earth. But we have to factor in that the junk isn’t stationary, like mangled metal on the side of the tracks after an incident on the ground. Space junk is always in motion.

There are calls for us to not ignore space junk and consideration that we should try to clean up the space junk. News reports say that the orbit around the Earth is filled with space junk. Discussions were ongoing at the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space that ran in early February after the collision of a Russian spacecraft that had not been working since 1995 with a U. S. Iridium commercial satellite. Scientists think the debris from this one accident alone could be dangerous to other satellites for the next 10,000 years.

Many pieces from the collision measure about four inches, about the size of a baseball or softball. On top of this and debris from 900 other satellites, there could be about 19,000 objects in Earth’s low and high orbit. As the number of pieces of space junk grows it is realistic that more collisions will occur.

How will we clean up space? Theories being discussed are ways to push the space junk out further away from Earth to the outer regions of Earth’s atmosphere. The plan is to get the nations of the world to work together to monitor and keep track of the space debris. They hope to bring together ideas and clean up space like we are learning to clean up Earth.