Gone junk fishing

• Autores: Aviva Rutkin
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2953, 2014, pág. 19
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The Japanese space agency, JAXA, will pilot its "electrodynamic tether" for the first time. It is one of many possible solutions that have been proposed to deal with space debris. Hundreds of thousands of pieces of spacecraft, satellites and other equipment from human spaceflight zip around our planet, some traveling faster than the speed of sound. According to a report released by the US Congressional Research Service, running into even a small piece of junk can be disastrous. An object 10 cm across could "catastrophically damage a typical satellite," it says. One just 1 cm across could disable a spacecraft. The worst-case scenario is the Kessler syndrome, proposed by astrophysicist Donald Kessler in the 1970s. Too much trash, he warned, and the pieces would collide with each other, resulting in more and more debris.