In 1964, Stanislav Lem published a humorous story "Save Space", where one of his regular heroes, a brave explorer of space Ijon Tichy, complained about the unforeseen consequences of space expansion and thoughtless tourism.
Many years have passed since the story was written. Mankind has not reached the stars, couples in love do not cruise in the asteroid belt and do not carve their names on their surface, and the space behind Sirius is still not full of advertising. But one of the passages of the text turned out to be surprisingly similar to reality.
"Professor Brookly of the observatory recently complained of the waning shine of both Centauri stars. And how can he not get weaker if the whole neighborhood is full of garbage! Around the largest planet of Sirius, the real pearl of this planet system, there appeared a ring like Saturn's rings, but consisting of empty beer and lemonade bottles. The astronaut flying this way is forced to bypass not only the clouds of meteorites, but also cans, eggshells and old newspapers.
Somewhere, because of this rubbish, no stars can be seen. Astrophysicists have been puzzling for years, trying to find the cause of such noticeable differences in the amount of space dust in different galaxies. And the thing, I think, is simple: the higher the civilization is, the more litter is garbage, hence all this dust, debris and rubbish."
It is unlikely that those who read this story half a century ago could imagine that such a trash ring would actually begin to form. And not at distant Sirius, but around our home planet.
Garbage day!
On October 4, 1957, the first artificial Earth satellite was launched and mankind approached the stars a little bit. In those days, all the people of the world tried to see in the sky "Sputnik" and saw a tiny glowing dot. Except it wasn't Sputnik, too small to be seen with the naked eye. This point was the second stage of the R-7 launcher that put it into orbit. It was the first space debris in history.
Over the years that followed, there were about five thousand launches that put almost 6,600 satellites into orbit. Of these, 3600 are still in space, and only 1000 of them are operational. Already at the end of the fifties, scientists began to think that the old satellites that had worked out their old ones would sooner or later start to interfere with the new ones.
Unfortunately, space debris is not limited to old satellites and spent rocket stages. Nowadays, space exploration systems track about twenty thousand objects in Earth's orbit, whose total mass is from 5 to 10 thousand tons. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. According to the European Space Agency, there are 45 thousand objects with a diameter of over 5 centimeters in orbit. As for the smaller bodies, hundreds of thousands of fragments with a diameter of 1 to 5 centimeters and millions of very small fragments fly over us in the sky.
Where's the garbage coming from in space?
If we lived in the Star Wars universe, everything would be clear. Broken spaceships and fighter jets are commonplace in a faraway galaxy. It is possible to imagine, as after the next large battle all workers who are not occupied on the building of the next Death Star, go on routine clearing of outer space. And on what else stands the light bonfire Empire and the rebels, behind which they have to clean up.
In our galaxy, however, space debris appears in much more banal ways. The launch of any satellite into orbit is accompanied by the formation of a mass of technological garbage: objects like explosive bolts, temporary fasteners, and protective coating elements get into the near-Earth space.
In addition, there are still rocket stages and boosters in space that have gained the first space velocity. Their tanks often contain untreated fuel, which is very volatile and easily vaporizes, sometimes resulting in powerful explosions. There have been cases when, after several years in space, used rocket stages exploded unexpectedly, throwing shrapnel made of small fragments around them. In recent years, there have been about 200 such explosions in near-Earth space. Only one explosion of an Indian rocket stage caused the formation of 300 large fragments at once.
Humanity is not only littering in the orbit of its home planet. What do you think Neil Armstrong did when he first opened the doors of the lunar module?
He threw a bag of garbage out of the cockpit. Only then did he come down to the lunar surface and say his famous phrase.
To be continued...