Closer satellites can be nudged out of orbit, and the smaller ones will burn up entirely on re-entry. Very high satellites can be blasted further into space, out of harm’s way, with the last of their fuel – that’s the “graveyard orbit”. “To prevent such a disaster, anyone launching something into orbit these days has to have a plan to either send it into a graveyard orbit, or send it back down to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere,” Nasa says. The Kessler Effect, or Kessler Syndrome, is the potential for the amount of debris in orbit to reach a critical mass where each collision creates more pieces of debris in a cascading way, to the point where the orbit is no longer usable. This possibility is called the ‘Kessler Effect’,” Nasa says. “There is so much junk that we are worried one tiny collision could trigger a big chain reaction. Space debris is rapidly clogging up space, and at orbital speeds of up to 17,500km/h even tiny flecks of paint can cause serious damage to other spacecraft.Īccording to Nasa, there are thousands of bits of space junk out there. When spacecraft die, they become a danger to everything else in orbit.
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