Debris in space worries scientists on earth.

Thats why they are scientists and we are not!

Here we are worrying about the amount of garbage that is being dumped on the earth mercilessly. We are sincerely concerned about the global warming, hole in the ozone layer etc but we continue to live like we lived five minutes earlier.

But the scientists are worrying about the debris in space created by millions of bits of orbiting garbage leftover from missions. These flying objects can delay launches of spaceships and satellites and can also potentially smash into spacecraft.

Yes, this I wondered about long back. How all those orbiting satellites stay off each other without any traffic signal or traffic regulating policemen.

The graveyard of ghostly scraps from satellites and other craft continues to grow. Last year, the intentional destruction of China's Fengyn weather staellite sent at least 150,000 bits of orbital debris less than a half-inch (one centimeter) across and larger into space, according to NASA's Orbital Debris Program.

Space Debris-->Courtesy:Google Image

We are all blissfully unaware of what happened on Feb 20th: On Feb. 20, another load of debris was scattered into space when the U.S. Navy shot down a spy satellite above the Pacific Ocean. Some 3,000 scraps spewed into space, each no larger than a football in size, adding to the cosmic clutter.

Do you know as a U.S. citizen that the U.S. Space Surveillance Network is tracking about 18,000 orbiting objects of debris about two inches in diameter and larger?

The space around our planet is also polluted by millions to tens of millions of smaller, marble-sized pieces of debris. In order to officially catalog derelict debris, scientists involved need to identify each object's size, the mission it's attached to and its orbit.

Its threatening:

"It could be made out of Jell-O or foam or stainless steel. When it's that big, it travels at orbital velocities and it hits something else, it's going to be a bad day," said Nicholas Johnson, program manager and chief scientist of the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

A real collision:
To date, there is only one recorded incident of a collision in which the debris was large enough to track. In 1996, a French satellite called CERISE was struck by a piece of a French rocket that had exploded 10 years earlier.

Read full story: Cosmic Clean-up

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