NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/JSC
- China’s Tiangong-1 space station recently crashed to Earth as a giant chunk of space junk.
- But there are millions of small, hard-to-track bits of orbital debris that can collide with satellites.
- In 2017, the US government logged 308,984 close calls with space junk and issued 655 “emergency-reportable” alerts to satellite operators.
- Alert systems help avoid a runaway space-junk disaster, a phenomenon called the Kessler syndrome that could dramatically reduce human access to space.
China’s Tiangong-1 space station fell to Earth on April 2, raining debris over a patch of Pacific Ocean some 2,500 miles south of Hawaii.
But Tiangong-1 is just the tip of the space-junk iceberg.See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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