The trouble with space junk

ACCORDING to NASA, America’s space agency, the skies high above the Earth are cluttered up with around 23,000 pieces of man-made space junk measuring 10cm or more across, zipping along at great speed and posing a threat to working satellites. The European Space Agency (ESA) reckons that collision alerts arising from worn-out satellites, defunct rockets and other clutter (such as launch adapters, lens covers, copper wires and the odd glove) have doubled in the past decade. Every such collision spawns more junk—a phenomenon known as the Kessler syndrome, named after Donald Kessler, an American physicist who postulated it in the 1970s. Why is space junk such a growing concern? Low-Earth orbit, the region between 160 and 2,000km above the Earth, is crucial to space exploration. It is home to about half of the roughly 1,300 satellites which scan the Earth in great detail for both military and civilian purposes. More

(Source: The Economist - May 12)