How To Clean Up Space Junk
Space junk is a real problem. NASA now tracks around 20000 pieces of debris orbiting Earth, most of them larger than 10cm across. Since the average speed of a collision between orbiting objects...
==========
On October the fourth, 1957 the first satellite, Sputnik I, was launched into space.Although it burned up in the atmosphere three months later, many satellites launched sincethen have not, leaving us with a virtual junk yard orbiting the earth. Now those debrisrepresent a real threat to the television communications and GPS satellites, not tomention the astronauts. But luckily, the Swiss have a plan to clean up space. So I have cometo Lausanne to figure out how they are going to do it.Most of the space junk orbiting earth is within 2000 kilometers of the earth’s surface.There are over 22,000 objects larger than this softball and over half a million largerthan this marble.Now all of the orbiting debris is going about seven to eight kilometers per second, butsince t...
==========
On October the fourth, 1957 the first satellite, Sputnik I, was launched into space.Although it burned up in the atmosphere three months later, many satellites launched sincethen have not, leaving us with a virtual junk yard orbiting the earth. Now those debrisrepresent a real threat to the television communications and GPS satellites, not tomention the astronauts. But luckily, the Swiss have a plan to clean up space. So I have cometo Lausanne to figure out how they are going to do it.Most of the space junk orbiting earth is within 2000 kilometers of the earth’s surface.There are over 22,000 objects larger than this softball and over half a million largerthan this marble.Now all of the orbiting debris is going about seven to eight kilometers per second, butsince t...
