Space is so exquisite and terrifying which consists stories of creation and evolution. We can see space from different layers of clouds on earth which has shining stars, placed somewhere afar. This blue planet has tremendous resources from which we settled and burgeoned for at least 200,000 years. Homo sapiens made it prepossessingly liveable but sadly covered this planet with filth and surprisingly not only on land but also on afar place that is space. Space debris is an artificial material that is left in space, and these are either abandoned launch vehicles, nonfunctional spacecraft, fragments of space missions, and crafts. Natural meteoroid and artificial (human-made) causation of orbital debris.
A NASA scientist Donald Kessler,1978, stated space debris is a chain reaction that collides to create more space junks like a domino effect till the point where earth’s orbit becomes unusable. This has become a real problem for all existing and upcoming space missions to study this far-fetched space and different stars as these swirling fragments can cause accidents and mission failure which ultimately affect the economy of a country.
The world today is not only limited to territorial power across nations but also in space. As far as we know, Earth is the only planet in our solar system, where we can find debris inside and outside of this beautiful blue planet and all credit goes to humans. This man-made garbage revolving around the earth’s orbit becoming a tough challenge for scientists. Since 1957, we have been sending spacecraft and the first one to achieve this milestone was Sputnik 1 which made a historic event and has created a path for numerous upcoming spacecraft for discrete countries.
With the onset of industrialization and globalization, most countries have the potential for space technologies. From Space X to ISRO, each one of them has multiple spacecraft in space revolving and connecting the world in one. These technologies have made our life convenient as flat as pancake. Collisions between natural debris with anthropogenic spacecraft would create chaos and damage in space as well as on earth. Recently an incident happened on 12th May in Gujarat, India, when fragments of suspected debris from space fell in three locations with a loud thud, made villagers rushed out of their homes.
Consequently, there must be numerous solutions to clean up this mess. Inception has started already and is been initiated by the ESA, a mission scheduled for 2025 which involves the launching of space capsule “Clearspace-1”, a remnant Vespa launched from VV02 (mass100kg). Another project NETRA (Network for Space Objects Tracking and Analysis) of India has debris tracking radar with a range of 1500km and an optical telescope will be inducted. The current situation of space debris must be the last straw for all of us to initiate the process with incredible solutions to remove trashes and junk from space since human intelligence has already achieved innumerable milestones which were far-fetched yet highly plausible.
©Nidhi Singh
Window to World 