EXPERTS fear an abandoned Russian military satellite has broken up over Earth contributing to dangerous “space junk”.
There are millions of pieces of debris orbiting the planet dumped from old rockets and other launches.
Nasa currently tracks some 54,000 bits that are larger than 10cm, but there’s an estimated 140million tiny fragments less than 1cm in length that are too small to be monitored.
Despite their small size, they can still pose significant damage to other functioning spacecraft, including the ISS.
Shards of metal no bigger than a fleck of paint can do the ISS enough damage that astronauts have to carry out repair work.
Space junk has previous left a huge dent in the ISS.
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Now it appears a retired secret Russian satellite dubbed the “inspector” might be adding to the problem in another area above Earth.
The Luch/Olymp satellite was launched back in 2014 and is believed to have been used to stalk spacecraft from the US and other countries in a zone known as the Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO).
This is an area located 22,236 miles above Earth‘s equator with satellites orbiting at the same speed as Earth’s rotation.
Luch/Olymp was recently decommissioned and moved into the so-called “graveyard orbit” which is a few hundred miles further out from the GEO zone.
But experts from space tracking firm S2A have spotted the satellite starting to “tumble in its graveyard orbit” on Friday night with “additional objects” around it.
Astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell told Space.com of what may have happened.
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One possibility is an another piece of debris could have hit Luch/Olymp itself.
If that’s the case, that would be a worrying outcome as it suggests that the graveyard has become more crowded and dangerous than previously believed.
In Lower Earth Orbit (LEO), scientists have long been concerned about a phenomenon known as as Kessler Syndrome.
The Kessler Syndrome is a concept thought up by the Nasa scientist Donald J. Kessler.
It refers to the idea that a chain reaction of exploding space debris could create so much space junk in the Low Earth Orbit that we’d be trapped on Earth.
It could also mean we wouldn’t have the use of satellites because they’d be broken up during the collisions.
The theory is based on the fact that there are already millions of micrometeoroids orbiting Earth, along with all the new manmade items we’re putting up there.
While the main concerns over Kessler Syndrome apply to LEO the same principles apply to GEO too.
And it could make future space missions dangerous.
