Space debris expert warns about dangers of orbital junk
The emerging problem of floating space junk becomes more and more evident and bothersome. Spacecraft and satellites are currently subject to high-speed impacts by more than 19,000 trackable objects, mainly old satellites, spent rocket stages, and fragments from disintegration, erosion, and collisions. There are also several hundred thousand objects the size of marbles, and several million the size of sand grains. Even a tiny piece of debris can inflict considerable damage, or even destroy an orbiting operational spacecraft. A report in 2011 by the National Research Council (NRC) warned NASA that the amount of space debris orbiting the Earth was at critical level. So are we now really close to a disaster induced by space debris as depicted in the blockbuster movie 'Gravity'? William Schonberg, professor of aerospace engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology who was the member of NRC committee that filed the report in 2011,...