Space Debris

space debris, also called space junk, artificial material that is orbiting Earth but is no longer functional. This material can be as large as a discarded rocket stage or as small as a microscopic chip of paint. Much of the debris is in low Earth orbit, within 2,000 km (1,200 miles) of Earth’s surface, though some debris can be found in geostationary orbit 35,786 km (22,236 miles) above the Equator. As of 2021, the United States Space Surveillance Network was tracking more than 15,000 pieces of space debris larger than 10 cm (4 inches) across. It is estimated that there are about 200,000 pieces between 1 and 10 cm (0.4 and 4 inches) across and that there could be millions of pieces smaller than 1 cm. How long a piece of space debris takes to fall back to Earth depends on its altitude. Objects below 600 km (375 miles) orbit several years before reentering Earth’s atmosphere. Objects above 1,000 km (600 miles) will orbit for centuries.

Because of the high speeds at which objects orbit Earth (up to 8 km [5 miles] per second), a collision with even a small piece of space debris can damage a spacecraft. For example, space shuttle windows often had to be replaced because of damage from collisions with debris smaller than 1 mm (0.04 inch). (When in orbit, the space shuttle flew tail-forward to protect the forward crew compartment.)

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The amount of debris in space threatens both crewed and uncrewed spaceflight. The risk of a catastrophic collision of a space shuttle with a piece of space debris was 1 in 300. (For missions to the Hubble Space Telescope, with its higher and more debris-filled orbit, the risk was 1 in 185.) If there is a greater than 1-in-100,000 chance of a known piece of debris colliding with the International Space Station (ISS), the astronauts perform a debris avoidance maneuver in which the ISS’s orbit is raised to avoid collision. On particularly dangerous occasions, such as in November 2021, when the ISS passed through the debris cloud from a Russian anti-satellite test, astronauts close the station’s hatches and shelter in their spacecraft.

On July 24, 1996, in the first collision between an operational satellite and a piece of space debris, a fragment from the upper stage of a European Ariane rocket collided with Cerise, a French microsatellite. Cerise was damaged but continued to function. The first collision that destroyed an operational satellite happened on February 10, 2009, when Iridium 33, a communications satellite owned by the American company Motorola, collided with Cosmos 2251, an inactive Russian military communications satellite, about 760 km (470 miles) above northern Siberia, shattering both satellites.

The worst space-debris event happened on January 11, 2007, when the Chinese military destroyed the Fengyun-1C weather satellite in a test of an anti-satellite system, creating more than 3,000 fragments, or more than 20 percent of all space debris. Within two years those fragments had spread out from Fengyun-1C’s original orbit to form a cloud of debris that completely encircled Earth and that would not reenter the atmosphere for decades. On January 22, 2013, the Russian laser-ranging satellite BLITS (Ball Lens in the Space) experienced a sudden change in its orbit and its spin, which caused scientists to abandon the mission. The culprit was believed to have been a collision with a piece of Fengyun-1C debris. Fragments from Fengyun-1C, Iridium 33, and Cosmos 2251 account for about one-half of all debris below 1,000 km (620 miles).

With the increasing amount of space debris and the advent of mega-constellations of thousands of satellites, there are fears that collisions such as that between Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 could set off a chain reaction (called the Kessler syndrome after American scientist Donald Kessler) in which the resulting space debris would destroy other satellites and so on, with low Earth orbit eventually becoming unusable. To forestall such a debris buildup, space agencies have begun taking steps to mitigate the problem, such as burning up all the fuel in a rocket stage so it does not explode later or saving enough fuel to deorbit a satellite at the end of its mission. The British satellite RemoveDEBRIS, which was launched in 2018 and deployed from the ISS, tested two different technologies for removing space debris: capture with a net and capture with a harpoon. RemoveDEBRIS also attempted to test a dragsail to slow down the satellite so that it could reenter the atmosphere, but the sail failed to deploy. Satellites in geostationary orbit that are near the end of their missions are sometimes moved to a “graveyard” orbit 300 km (200 miles) higher, and in January 2022 the Chinese Shijian-21 satellite pulled the defunct Beidou-2 G2 far past the usual graveyard orbit to a new orbit 3,000 km (2,000 miles) higher than the belt of geostationary satellites.