Forget Alien Invasions: Space Junk is the Real Menace from Space

Forget Alien Invasions: Space Junk is the Real Menace from Space 

On average one known man-made object falls back to Earth each day.

The current debris population in the LEO region has reached the point where the environment is unstable and collisions will become the most dominant debris-generating mechanism in the future.

In the long term, the removal of large orbital debris will be essential to the sustainability of space operations.

Orbital debris is any object in Earth orbit which no longer serves
a useful function.

— Most are small fragments and burn-up during reentry.
— Components which do survive are statistically more likely to land in the water or large, sparsely populated areas such as Siberia, the Australian Outback, or the Canadian Tundra.

• By requiring or encouraging space system operators to limit stays in low Earth orbit to less than 25 years, the number of uncontrolled reentries of spacecraft and launch vehicle stages will increase, potentially posing elevated risks to people and property on Earth.

Vice News
Space Junk Orbiting Our Planet Has Become a Big Mess
https://news.vice.com/article/space-junk-orbiting-our-planet-has-become-a-big-mess

Big Think
Forget Alien Invasions – Space Junk is the Real Menace from Space!
http://tinyurl.com/j9dwtja

NASA
http://tinyurl.com/z3mf8hg

Clips, images credit: ESO, ESA/HUBBLE & NASA

Image credit: NASA