Humans are extremely irresponsible creatures. It is not enough for them to literally create whole mountains of garbage on Earth. It is also necessary to obscure the entire orbit of our planet in the same way. The European Space Agency at the end of last week reported that, despite some progress of humanity in space exploration, so much debris has accumulated in the orbit of our planet that it is starting to spiral out of control. We urgently need to solve this problem now if we want to think about future generations.
At the Seventh European Conference on Space Debris Problems (estimate the scale, even a separate conference was created on this matter!), About 350 scientists from different parts of the world discussed ways to reduce the amount of space debris. According to rough estimates, about 750,000 debris objects larger than 1 centimeter and more than 166 million objects larger than 1 millimeter have accumulated in orbit. All this rubbish fills the orbits of the planet, which have commercial and scientific value.
The main debris threat is associated with the operation of several hundred different satellites used in telecommunications, weather, navigation, broadcasting and climate monitoring projects. If something happens to these satellites, it will not only seriously hamper research projects, but also the countries themselves that actively rely on communication satellite technologies will be seriously affected. And among them, by the way, not only the United States, but also Russia.
Scientists are convinced that there is no longer any opportunity to ignore this problem. The risk of collision of current operating satellites with space debris is very high, and simple changes in their working orbits, as well as in which case the launch of other satellites will not solve the problem, but rather will further aggravate.
“This conference shows that we are very dependent on technology. Everyone needs to understand this,”said Holger Krag, ESA's head of space debris management.
“However, implementing countermeasures to tackle the garbage problem still looks very difficult. Nevertheless, it is critically important to come to some kind of general consensus now, especially against the background of future promising projects, again related to the launch of hundreds of new satellites."
As Krag dismissed, one of such projects is the plan of the private aerospace agency SpaceX Ilan Musk to create a new Internet communication network, which in the longer term should also help in the implementation of projects for the colonization of Mars.
As for the hints on how exactly ESA plans to deal with the problem of space debris, they were not voiced at the conference again. However, it should be recalled that some private and public companies have previously proposed their ideas on how to remove debris from orbit.
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