Space debris can make the space inaccessible to man: infographics

Habré not once, not twice wrote about space debris and the problems associated with it. Now the scientists and engineers who are engaged in designing spacecraft problems much more than, say, 20 years ago.

Apart from the problems in the design of the device itself and planning his route with all the braking / acceleration and other maneuvers, now I have to take into account and debris. Clash of the unit cost many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars with a small fragment of the device might be destroyed for science / business.

Well, such debris is growing.

first drew the problem NASA employee Donald Kessler, who wrote in 1978, along with another co-author of the article «Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt». After 13 years, he again drew attention to this problem, write another статью on this topic .

Among other things, the fragments are multiplied because when pitting the two objects in space, they are separated by another more parts that, when faced with something else, generate new objects. And so on and so forth. How many now orbiting space debris? This is more or less clearly shows infographics:





And here's another visual visualization problems , which displays all the data at the time of November 2013.

Well, what to do with all this rubbish, no one knows. Various companies, agencies and individuals are developing projects clearing near-Earth space, but the practical implementation of all this while nobody has started.

P.S. By the way, while writing notes, thinking of something read as SF story (neither the author nor not remember the name) which addressed the problem of debris in space (not only in the near-Earth space), in a slightly different way. In the story, it was about an incident 20 years ago when, as a result of an accident on a spaceship into space has been thrown out a lot of things, plus a victim of an accident. And all this is being investigated strict employees of special services. Maybe someone will remember the name, please indicate in the comments, too, refers to the subject directly.

Source: habrahabr.ru/post/230199/