There is no inventory of space debris showing what objects are there and which are being used, Jah explains. The space station has done over 20 maneuvers for the bigger objects.” “Right now, the Space Station can handle small debris objects. “I’ve got images of the windows of a space shuttle just riddled with very small objects,” Crassidis says. “We’re going to be in a lot of trouble 50 years from now.” I can say that with 100 percent certainty,” John Crassidis, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo, tells Popular Mechanics. “Don’t let anybody kid you, there is no practical solution right now. Space near Earth is already dotted with defunct and working satellites dead rocket bodies pieces of rocket bodies and satellites and their components such as nuts, bolts, and paint, Jah says. I can say that with 100 percent certainty.” “Because we haven’t defined yet what the threshold for undesirable outcomes is, we can’t quantify what the carrying capacity is, but I will say I’ve already spoken to a number of people, and even some from NASA, who said, ‘Listen, we can’t even get meaningful science out of our satellites because we have to maneuver out of the way of possible collisions so frequently.’” When this happens, we will have more difficulty preventing collisions. However, he says that we are starting to already exceed the carrying capacity of orbital highways. I believe that Mother Nature always finds an equilibrium state to reach, so at some point, the collisions would be less frequent, and things would be too small to produce other pieces.” “This idea of a runaway train sort of thing with endless cascading effects of collisions-I don’t think that’s physically possible. Moriba Jah, associate professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, tells Popular Mechanics that he is skeptical. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play Crowded Orbital Highways “The control of future debris requires, at a minimum, that we not leave future payloads and rocket bodies in orbit after their useful life, and might require that we plan launches to return some objects already in orbit.” He also recommended that we avoid sending large structures into space. an era that will be dominated by a slowly increasing number of random catastrophic collisions,” Donald Kessler, the senior scientist at NASA who studied this risk, wrote in 2009. “We are entering a new era of debris control. This hypothetical scenario is known as the “Kessler syndrome.” Imagine a world with no functioning satellites for television, GPS, the military, communications, or science-a world where a zone of colliding debris in Earth’s orbit prevents us from sending missions to space.
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