Debris Crisis

Space debris is a result of countries destroying their own spacecraft and leaving the ruins behind or sending trash up into the earth's atmosphere. This debris can cause issues for satellites by increasing risk of collision to multi-million dollar apparatuses. Eventually space debris will experience orbital decay and fall back down to Earth, possibly leading to civilian deaths and injuries, property damage, and environmental harm. Most objects in space are being tracked by the US surveillance agency which has brought light to the new problem of space debris. This agency estimates about 28,160 objects remain in space to this day which includes satellites, rocket parts and other man made materials that were sent during the years of space exploration. About only 4,000 are still intact and operational satellites that are still being used to this day. The majority of space debris is single use objects such as lens covers, rocket fuel tanks, rocket stages, and launch adapters. Although collisions only play a small part in the distribution of space debris, more collisions are expected to play a role in spreading small fragments of objects everywhere. Most space debris fly at speeds up to 18,000 miles per hour which is detrimental if it collides with anything. As collisions happen, more space junk is spread in space which causes the probability of collisions to increase. The main contributors to the debris crisis are Russia, the United States, and China as they launched the most things into space and conducted many anti-satellite weapon tests which resulted large amounts of space debris. The US took down many of their own satellites using missiles which caused a multitude of debris to be formed. 

-by Samuel, Joshua, Alice