Space Junk Visualization Reveals a Serious Problem Jessica Orwig - Business Insider
go to original December 27, 2015

Space Debris: 1957 - 2015 (Stuart Grey)

Right now, more than half a million pieces of man-made space junk orbit Earth, and if we don't put a stop to the ever-growing clutter, it could become too dangerous for manned travel to space.

Space junk accumulates because we don't clean up after ourselves. Instead of returning defunct satellites, we usually leave them out in space. But out there, they run the risk of colliding with meteors or other human-made debris, which is traveling at blazing speeds of more than 17,000 miles per hour.

A single collision will completely obliterate a satellite and turn it into hundreds of smaller pieces.

As you can imagine, this only exacerbates the problem because, after these collisions, the junk doesn't simply go flying off into space. Instead, Earth's gravity traps it in nearby orbits, which is rapidly cluttering up our path to space.

And if that path gets too crowded, it might be too dangerous to send anything into space, ever again, because the chances of a collision would be too great. It would be like sending a soldier through a mine field.

You can check out an interactive version of Grey's animation here.

Read the whole article at Mexico Ledger

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