At any specific moment, more than 10,000 satellites wander around the planet in about 17,000 miles per hour. This constellation of machines is the technological spine of modern life, which makes GPS, weather forecasts and direct TV broadcasts possible.
But space is crowded. Since the dawn of space in the late 1950s, humans fill the sky with garbage. Dead satellite accumulation, cut from old missiles, and other waste numbers in tens of millions and obstacles along large speeds so that even small bits can from deadly damage to the spacecraft. The evasion of this minefield is actually a headache for satellite operators, and prepares for the worst – not only because humans are now releasing Thousands of new crafts every year.
All excess carbon dioxide resulting from people who burn fossil fuels reduce the upper atmosphere, which exacerbates the problem with the scrap of space. New searchAnd that was published in the sustainability of nature on Monday, I found that if emissions do not decrease, you will be able at least 25 million satellites – about half of the current ability – from working safely in orbit by the end of the century. This leaves room for only 148,000 in the tropical range that most satellites use, and it is not as abundant as it seems: a A report from the US government accountability office in 2022 It is estimated that up to 60,000 of the new satellite will mobilize our sky by 2030. According to reports, Elon Musk’s Spacex wants to publish alone. 42000 One of the satellites stars.
“The environment is already confused. William Parker, a doctoral researcher at the Ministry of Aviation and Space Mission at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the main author of the study, said that satellites are constantly overcoming the right and left. 50,000 times. “like As long as we are emitting from it Greenhouse gases“We are more likely to see more collision between things in space,” Parker said.
Until recently, the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on the upper atmosphere were reserved to the extent that scientists called it “ignorance”. But research that uses modern satellite data revealed that, it is paradoxes, the carbon dioxide that heats the lower atmosphere is Green updated upper atmosphereIt caused it to shrink like a balloon was left in the cold. The air is left insomnia on the edge of the space.
The problem is that the density of the atmosphere is the only thing that naturally pulls the scrap of the space from the orbit. The atmosphere of the Earth suddenly does not make the way for space emptiness, but it becomes greatly thinner at a point known as the Kármán line, about 100 km away. The organisms that revolve around the planet are pulled through the continuous air density, which escalates from the planet until the atmosphere is eventually reinforced, and it often burns as they do.
According to non -profit Aerospace Corporation, the slightest orbits takes only A few months To get a preposition. But most satellites operate in an area called “low -Earth orbit”, ranging from 200 and 2000 km, and can take hundreds of thousands to thousands of years to fall. The higher external logic of the Earth’s influence is referred to as a “grave” that can carry things for millions of years.
Parker said: “We rely on the atmosphere to clean all we have in space, and he does worse in that as it shrinks and cools.” “There is no other way to go down. If there is no atmosphere, it will stay there indefinitely.”
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Parker’s study found that in the future where emissions remain high, the atmosphere will lose a lot of density so that half of the satellites can suit all the debris stuck in space. Almost all of them will need to pressure at the bottom of the low Earth orbit, where they will regularly need to use their defenses to avoid clouds. Between 400 and 1000 km, where the majority of satellites operate, with less than 148,000 safe. More than that, satellite risk collides with debris or each other is a threat to the space industry.
“The debris can continue from any collision to destroy more satellites,” said Jonathan McDowell, astronomer at the Harvard Smithson Center for Astronomical Physics in Massachusetts, which did not participate in the study of nature. “Thus you can get a series of reaction as all satellites hit each other, disintegrate, create more and more debris.”
The domino effect, known as the Kisler syndrome, can fill in the Earth with a lot of destroyed chaos so that the launch or operation of satellites becomes impossible. It is a fugitive scenario that warns paper of greenhouse gas emissions. “But the reaction of the chain does not happen overnight,” said McDowell. “You suffocate more slowly and more on your dirt.”
According to the European Space Agency, at least 650 disintegrationThe explosions, or collision with their debris, have led to space since space exploration. Space surveillance networks, such as the American space force, are currently approximately 40,000 pieces of debris, some are large like a car. It is also estimated at least 130 million smaller being from 10 centimeters as it revolves around the Earth, but it is very small so that it cannot be monitored.
Scientists were recently looking for ways to remove this debris, through, as MCDOWLL laid a metaphor, “sending garbage trucks to space.” In 2022, a Chinese satellite successfully grabbed a tiredness by matching its speed before Pulling it to the orbit of a cemetery. In 2024, a Japanese company, Astroscale, managed to maneuver a retrieval device 15 meters from a missile that was ignored – close enough to capture magnetic – before retreating.
“In general, it is an environmental problem that is stored for future generations,” said McDowell. “Will we reach our ability? I think we will discover in the difficult way.”
