Is space debris a threat?

It took a bit more than half a century since the man launched the first satellite into space in 1957 , and now an incredible, exotic problem has ceased to be such, and turned into a rather real threat. The first flights to space were marked by a general euphoria. No one even thought of the question: where will the spent satellites go, what will become of the launch vehicles, what about the dust from the burnt fuel? The USSR and the United States were racing in the near-Earth space, launching into the orbit more and more rockets, satellites and stations. And the consequences of this short-sighted policy did not take long: in 1978, the debris of the Soviet satellite Kosmos-594 fell on Canada. Then the Soviet Union paid a huge amount of money to the affected country for the elimination of the consequences of radiation contamination. But less than a year later, as the wreckage of the American station, having fulfilled its time, crumbled over Australia.

The space debris dropped into the ground in both cases did not lead to human casualties, but the incidents caused scientists to think. After all, in near-Earth space, not only artificial satellites and International Space Stations (about 700) are cruising along their orbits, but also stations, fragments and other man-made objects that have worked out their term. And if garbage on our planet can be localized and disposed of somewhere, then such objects will not be able to do with the objects of the stormy cosmic activity of mankind. These emissions could be forgotten, if they did not move. And they fly in an airless space with a huge speed - 9 kilometers per second. The collision at such a speed of a spacecraft with a small iron gauge of only a few centimeters can ram the skins and lead to catastrophe.

According to scientists, space debris over the past half a century has grown to unimaginable proportions. In different orbits around the Earth, 11 thousand objects with a size of more than 10 cm and 600 thousand debris from one to ten centimeters rotate. Now, developing new models of space vehicles, engineers are thinking and protecting them from possible collisions with unwanted flying objects. The movement of especially large pieces is followed by special radar, which warns astronauts about the imminent threat. The ISS 3-4 times a year should deviate from its route in order to avoid collision with garbage.

Thus, space flights have become unsafe also because space explorers can unexpectedly and fatally meet with voluminous garbage, plowing starry spaces. And if the ship's hull allows you to keep the whole body (and even that, from small debris), then this does not apply to solar panels that have nothing to cover and protect. Worse still, sometimes two different objects collide and break. A large object disappears from the radar, and in return there appear thousands of smaller but no less dangerous fragments.

But how to remove space debris? So far, nothing is more clever, how to observe the movement of particularly large waste and develop the trajectory of the movement of new satellites, taking into account the movement of wreckage of old ships, is not invented. There is a utopian project put forward by the Swiss Technological Institute of Lausanne, according to which it is necessary to orbit the satellite "Clean Space One", which will find one piece of garbage, capture it and rush to the Earth, where they both will burn in dense layers of the atmosphere. But, it seems, 8 million euros - too high a price for cleaning one piece.

So far, scientists have focused on the problem of how to make space debris not increase in volume in the future. Now the old satellites are transferred to a lower orbit, so that they enter the Earth's attraction and burned in the atmosphere, or, conversely, they are taken to a higher trajectory, where they do not run the risk of encountering operating apparatus. The remains of nuclear fuel from the rocket stages are drained to prevent explosions from collisions.