After Earth, space pollution poses a new challenge for scientists

Scientists today are facing difficulty in observing the stars. It is not due to clouds or air pollution space There is pollution.

An uncontrollable in February this year Satellite After spending 13 years in space, it finally fell back to Earth in the Pacific Ocean. It was the European Space Agency’s ERS-2 satellite weighing five and a half thousand pounds.

But it’s just a satellite. US space agency NASA According to NASA, there are at least 25,000 softball-sized objects orbiting Earth and over 100 million smaller objects.

Officials warn that there are 9,000 metric tons of junk in space, which can travel 10 times faster than a bullet and be devastating to every rocket and device in its path.

(Handout/NASA/JPL-Caltech/AFP) This image taken by the Mars Perseverance rover on July 12, 2022, obtained by NASA shows debris from a falling satellite on the surface of Mars.

Experts say that even a small piece of debris traveling through space at a speed of 23,000 miles per hour could break a window of the International Space Station.

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More than 5,000 large objects in this contamination are satellites belonging to Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX. The company has applied to send 30,000 more Starlink satellites into space in recent years.

According to a 2023 Guardian report, uncontrolled debris in orbit has astronomers worried. This debris is disrupting their telescopic observations and preventing new discoveries.

NASA has confirmed suspicions that the strange object that crashed into a Florida house last month actually came from the International Space Station (ISS).

The agency analyzed the cylindrical object after it hit the roof and two floors of a house in Naples on March 8 and determined that it came from a cargo pallet of old batteries, which were launched from the ISS in 2021.

What is space pollution?

Space debris, formally known as orbital debris, can be fragments of defunct satellites or the rockets that carried them into space. Likewise, debris from missiles and equipment left behind by astronauts. Space debris can be as small as a school bus (such as the inactive Envisat satellite, launched in 2002) or paint chips.

Space debris is not just missile debris and satellite parts. Other items left behind include:

. In 1965, astronaut Ed White lost an extra glove

. A spatula lost by astronaut Piers Sellers in 2005

. Astronaut Sunita Williams’ camera that drifted away during a spacewalk in 2007 and

. Andy Warhol drawing left by the Apollo 12 mission in 1969