This week, NASA announced that the Kepler Spacecraft, which helped provide new data on the Milky Way Galaxy, has become permanently disabled. So what happens now? Well…nothing. The telescope, which weighs more than 2,000 pounds and cost more than $500 million to build, simply becomes a piece of space junk, floating around the solar system forever.
But this is just the latest object to join the giant wastebasket in the sky – and a lot of the trash is sitting just above our own atmosphere. NASA estimates that there are more than 13,000 pieces of man-made debris orbiting the Earth right now. Some objects are disabled satellites. Other junk is the waste generated from manned spaceflight including used booster rockets, clumps of solid rocket fuel and even a glove lost by astronaut Ed White during a spacewalk in 1965 that’s still in orbit today.
Having all this trash in the sky is becoming a problem. Much of the debris is orbiting at speeds of 17,000 miles per hour, which means it can cause serious damage to anything in its path. This past March, a piece of a broken Chinese weather satellite collided with a Russian satellite gathering scientific data and damaged it beyond repair.
Removing space junk can cost billions of dollars, so the solution has often been to wait and let the debris fall back to Earth. This is what happened with Skylab, the first U.S. space station, which was launched in 1973 and then plummeted back to Earth in 1979, scattering its remains over the Indian Ocean and parts of Australia. But scientists believe that many objects could remain in orbit for thousands of years. Hopefully by then, someone will have invented a giant broom and dust pail that works in outer space.
