Space trash.

We are familiar with air pollution, water pollution, land pollution, even noise and light pollution. What do you think about Space pollution? Do you know that there will be a serious impact in future? The race of human space exploration started in the year 1957. Sputnik was the first artificial Earth satellite launched by Soviet Union. This great success attracted the countries worldwide to make their own space vehicles. The first artificial object to reach another celestial body was Luna 2 reaching the Moon in 1959. Next to this, we started exploring other planets in our Solar system. But, now we extended our view capable of capturing images of other galaxies from the nearest galaxy "Alpha centauri" to the farthest galaxy "MACS0647". However, it is beneficial to the mankind , there is a serious issue behind this. That is Space trash! Initially, the term space debris is referred to the natural debris such as asteroids, meteoroids, comets, icy rocks etc in the space. However, in the beginning of 1979, NASA Orbital Debris program (NODP) referred the artificially created waste such as old satellites, rocket stages, even screws and nuts in the Earth orbit as Space trashes. With the development in the human space exploration, space trash is also increasing enormously. International Space Station (ISS) and other satellites such as communication satellites, GPS satellites, weather-monitoring satellites and even many space telescopes are revolving around our Earth in different path called Orbits. The orbit is classified into LEO (Lower Earth Orbit), MEO (Medium Earth Orbit), GEO (Geostationary orbit) and HEO (High Earth Orbit) based on the distance from the Earth surface.

We have seen over 5,000 launches since the space race began in 1957 and that created over 20,000 pieces of space junk larger than a soccer ball. They travel at speed up to 17,500 mph, fast enough for a small piece of orbital trash to damage a satellite or a spacecraft. There are 500,000 pieces of debris, that are of the size of a marble or larger and many millions of pieces of debris that are so small they can’t be tracked. Even the flecks of paint as small as a grain of sand can hit a satellite with much force as 550 pound, an object travelling with the speed ten times as fast as bullet. If this, collide with any satellite, it produces an explosion of 7 kg of TNT. This space trash will make our satellite systems to collapse and may produce harmful effects on human when it gets accelerated towards Earth since it has radioactive materials. Apart from this, we have many serious issues. We are planning for the further development in Space experience. Mars colonization is one of the important future plannings. These will get affected by these space trashes.

Thus, Space agencies and Spacecraft engineers should consider this and bring a change in the choice of the materials that will lead the mankind towards the great extend of success.