Mount Everest, Pacific Ocean, Outer Space
If there's something human beings excel at it's messing up their environment. From offal to discards. Shards of pottery, arrowheads, skeletal remains and fossilized feces give tremendous instruction of the habits and lifestyles of early human habitants of this Planet. And, until civil authorities in ancient Rome hit upon the marvellous idea of constructing public aqueducts and
sanitation and sewage systems, humans truly fouled their nests.
Of course modern hygienic sanitation systems don't entirely solve the problems endemic to many societies of people littering their properties with discarded junk that some still see value in, to convert to other usable forms. We have so much that requires disposal, from daily kitchen waste to garbage of a far more durable and time-defying nature, not to mention all manner of electronic equipment.
There are no areas left on this globe without piles of garbage, reeking and rotting, creating toxic gases and decaying. The Himalays are littered with discarded oxygen tanks, with human waste. Even the most remote areas of the ocean have floating junkpiles of discarded plastics which will take their sweet time decaying.
And of course there is also Outer Space, where over the past half-Century, humankind has littered there as well.
It is estimated that garbage left from 4,600 space launches of one kind or another through space exploration have left millions of pieces of metal, plastic and glass pieces, whirling about purposelessly, caught in the maelstrom of attraction and repulsion, endlessly being split into smaller and smaller pieces. And these bits of space junk can return to Earth, can cause problems.
But they're more likely to cause problems for satellites or spacecraft or the International Space Station. In low Earth orbit debris that may circulate impacts at roughly ten kilometres per second (36,000 kilometres per hour), so try to imagine the clash of two moving objects at that quite unimaginable speed.
Which is what the current temporary occupants of the International Space Station, three Russian cosmonauts, two American astronauts and a Japanese astronaut were compelled to deal with when they were alerted to the trajectory of a high-speed object hurtling toward their orbiting lab. They evacuated to shelter themselves inside two Soyuz spacecraft, a mere 18 minutes before the object might have impacted.
As it happened, it passed and missed the ISS by 250 metres, and after having spent a half-hour of suspenseful waiting, the six individuals whose busy day was briefly interrupted resumed their places in the space station. This was an unusual, though not entirely rare happening. There have been previous collisions between space junk and discarded space parts.
And the warning is that it will only get worse. Roughly 16,000 objects larger than 10 centimetres across are regularly tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, NASA informs.
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, June 29, 2011
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