objects in orbit
Relatively speaking, space is still clean. But near misses with space debris (and much larger cosmic objects) still happen. Two stories from the last week show that there is a unique risk to being in space.
The first incident affected the astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS). According to Associated Press, “The three-member crew …was ordered Thursday to seek refuge in their Russian Soyuz lifeboat, minutes before a chunk of space debris narrowly missed the station. According to NASA, a 5-inch piece of a spent rocket motor came within striking distance.”
The astronauts didn’t see anything pass by, but precautions are mandatory since objects flying at 18,000 miles per hour can cause catastrophic damage.
On a much larger scale, 2009 DD45, an asteroid the size of a 10-story building came within 45,000 miles of earth. That’s only 1/5th the distance between the earth and the moon–a very near miss in astronomical terms. In 1908 when a similar sized space object hit the earth in Siberia, it destroyed 800 square miles of forest (the Tunguska Event” event).
While the risk of objects from deeper space is always present, the objects we’ve put there are making travel significantly more dangerous. Last month’s collision of two satellites created even more debris, prompting NASA to raise the estimated risk for the upcoming shuttle mission from a 1-in-300 chance of catastrophe to a 1-in-185 chance.
At some point, a new career must be invented: space garbage collection. Otherwise, one of the hundreds of future space missions is likely to be involved in the first manned collision in space.
