AaS! 155: Who’s Going To Clean Up All That Space Junk?

Ask a Spaceman!

Paul M. Sutter

Astrophysics, Science, Cosmos, Holes, Black, Astronomy, Natural Sciences, Universe, Cosmology, Space, Physics

4.8 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 6 July 2021

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How did so much junk get up in space? How can we clean it up? How is it making light pollution worse? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.

Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).

Video credits: NASA, ESA, Planck, WMAP, Illustris

Transcript

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0:00.0	On April 24th, 1996, the ballistic mission defense organization, which some branch of the U.S.
0:17.6	government that I've never heard about before and officially doesn't
0:20.9	exist anymore, but that's not the point of the story. Anyway, in 96, they used a Delta 2 rocket
0:25.8	to launch a little space experiment. It was a satellite to monitor infrared emission in space.
0:33.5	One year later, Lottie Williams was minding her own business, taking a walk in a park in our hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
0:44.1	She saw a flash of light in the sky like a meteor, and it was pretty cool.
0:48.3	And then she felt it.
0:50.3	A six-inch long piece of fiberglass and aluminum hit her shoulder.
0:56.2	It wasn't traveling very quickly as it was very thin and the atmosphere slowed it down, but it still stung.
1:02.4	Moments later, the second stage of the Delta II rocket used to launch the infrared mission crashed into the ground a couple hundred miles away
1:11.9	in Texas.
1:15.3	1983, NASA Mission STS7.
1:20.0	This was the second flight of the Challenger Space Shuttle, and the crew included
1:25.0	Sally Ride, NASA's first female astronaut.
1:28.3	While in orbit, a tiny fleck of paint, so small you could barely see it, struck one of the windows.
1:37.3	It left a tiny impact crater about a millimeter wide.
1:43.3	In 1994, a tiny piece of debris struck space shuttle endeavor,
1:48.4	digging itself halfway through a window. In 2006, a piece of a circuit board shot a hole
1:57.6	straight through the space shuttle Atlantis' radiator panels.
2:02.8	In 2009, the Eridium Company, which manages a fleet of communication satellites,
2:10.1	received an alert that one of their satellites was approaching within a dangerous distance
2:14.8	of another satellite, a 2,100-pound Russian military communication
	...

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