How Much Space Junk Is There
How much space junk is there.
How much space junk is there. There is over 5500 tons of space junk above earth s surface. They mostly consist of small and medium debris within 700 36 000 km range in the atmosphere. Space debris and human spacecraft more than 500 000 pieces of debris or space junk are tracked as they orbit the earth.
What s more there are around 34 000 pieces of space junk bigger than 10 centimetres in size and millions of smaller pieces that could nonetheless prove disastrous if they hit something else. They all travel at speeds up to 17 500 mph fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft. While there are about 2 000 active satellites orbiting earth at the moment there are also 3 000 dead ones littering space.
Of those about 21 000 objects are larger than 4 inches 10 1 cm indiameter and. One of the largest pieces of uncontrolled space debris fell back down and landed on earth today passing directly over los angeles and central park in new york city and landing in the atlantic ocean. We ve left a lot of junk up there.
Space surveillance network is tracking more than 14 000 pieces of space junk that are larger than 10 cm 4 inches across such as defunct satellites and rocket stages. More than 23 000 known man made fragments. There are about 500 000 pieces of spacejunk.
Over 21 000 pieces of space trash larger than 4 inches 10 centimeters and half a million bits of junk between 1 cm and 10 cm are estimated to circle the planet. In earth s orbit itself the u s. And the number is only predicted.