Social Responsibility Of Debris In The Lower Earth Orbit

Creating and discarding junk has been a natural result of human mannerism. We as humans create, eat, discard, and disregard junk. Now, none of these options show immediate harm to our health or environment. If we disregard the junk we create and discard, the danger it can bring to ourselves may be catastrophic. The space debris that is piling up in the Lower Earth Orbit is the perfect example of this. There are over 500,000 pieces of debris being tracked and millions of untracked debris that are at least 1 cm or smaller orbiting around the Earth [1]. During the first missions prior to 1961, space debris was not a topic of concern because there was an estimate of about 50 or more pieces of debris in the Lower Earth Orbit. The concern became

Awareness of the space debris has been gaining momentum on the fear of Kessler’s Syndrome. A NASA scientist named Donald Kessler that developed a scenario where there could be a self-sustaining collision in the lower orbit of the Earth. It has been coined the name “Kessler’s Syndrome”. It is the idea of debris continuously colliding with each other creating even more pieces of debris. Matter within the Lower Earth Orbit travels approximately 22,000 kilometers per hour so the impact of collision between a piece of debris smaller than 1 cm and an 8,000-kilogram satellite can be disastrous. These collisions would create a vast amount of small debris, which will be impossible to pass because of the amount of debris present and the speed at which it is going [4]. Many scientists believe that the more frequent collisions happening in the lower orbit are the beginning stages of Kessler’s syndrome so the urgency of finding a resolution is higher than ever. What they are ignoring are the pieces of spacecraft falling from the

It began very subtle as 50% of the debris was disintegrated while traveling through the Earth’s atmosphere. It fell on deserted lands and no lives or property were ever in danger so it was easy for everyone to look over. The space community was caught up on preventing Kessler’s Syndrome putting no concern on the falling debris. However, a couple of young scientist and engineers from the University of Washington found it odd on how the pieces of debris were able to survive through the orbital decay and the travel through the Earth’s atmosphere. Jake and Kevin were both graduates of the University of Washington. Jake majored in Astronomy and received his PhD in Astrophysics while Kevin was an Electrical Engineer major with a PhD in Aerospace Engineer. They worked as a duo on multiple projects for NASA and are currently working on a high-powered laser that could detect an accurate temperature and material of another planet. The duo is completely aware of the debris surrounding Earth because part of the problem that they have during their experiments is finding a clear path to test the laser without any interference from the debris. Since the first sighting of space debris on the Earth’s surface, Jake has been digging up through news archives finding if there was any other record of this happening but he found nothing. He