July 17, 2008
Earth's Ringed Wonder
As a writer, I’ve never warmed to the expression “a picture is worth 1,000 words,” but I found one that left me speechless:
Kudos to the European Space Agency for finding a way to graphically unmask the cloud of debris circling Earth. Like many problems, this one grew slowly over time.
It started when the first man-made object reached orbit, the Soviet satellite Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957. Since then, more than 6,000 have followed. Fewer than 15 percent are operational today.
The dead satellites aren’t the main problem. It’s the ones that have blown up and the fragments of rocket bodies that booted them into orbit. In all, about 10,000 pieces of debris are being tracked by ground radar and optical telescopes, but it is the estimated 50,000 items too small for detection that are making the highways in space a hazard to travel.
The speed is what kills. Flecks of paint just .33 mm in size have cracked windows on the space shuttle. That’s what happens when objects are traveling 17 times faster than machine gun bullets.
China became the world’s most egregious contributor to space debris when it intentionally blew up a defunct weather satellite last year in a weapons test (so much for international treaties), boosting the amount of detectable space junk by 22 percent.
Tack it on to the long list of topics under discussion at the annual COSPAR (Committee on Space Research) meeting in Montreal this week. And while we're at it, perhaps we should think about adding Earth to the list of planets sporting rings: 
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