DEFINITION – Under the heading space junk comes a range of debris, materials of various kinds orbiting the Earth, such as: rocket stages, satellite fragments, paint flakes, dust, material ejected from rocket engines, coolant released from nuclear satellites and other tiny particles.

The first objects in space date back to 1957 and the forerunner launched into orbit from Earth was the Soviet Union’s Sputnik-1. Since then, launches and, consequently, space debris have gradually increased, increasing the risk of collisions with orbiting satellites.

Not everyone is aware that one to two pieces of debris fall to Earth every day, causing such burning and air pollution that the ozone layer is gradually thinning.

This is why it is called space junk but looks more like a bullet discharge. In recent decades, space junk has become an increasingly serious threat to the safety of current and future space missions, but above all to the safety of our Earth and our own lives.

The real first documented collision involving space debris happened in 1996 when a French satellite was struck and damaged by debris from a French rocket that had esplode a decade before. But the orbiting debris in space became a concern when, in 2007, the Chinese weather satellite FengYun-1C was intentionally destroyed in order to conduct a test of “anti-satellite weapons” behaviour, thereby generating a security problem. This problem took a more serious proportions in 2009, when above Siberia, at an altitude of almost 500 miles, two satellites (the American Iridium 33, still operational, and the Russian Cosmos 2251, already decommissioned) collided at a speed of about 22,300 miles per hour, forming a cloud of thousands of debris.

Since the catastrophic impact of these satellites, the question of space junk has arisen.

In 2021, to aggravate the already compromised situation, Russia conducted another “anti-satellite weapons” test by disintegrating the Kosmos-1408 satellite weighing over two tonnes.

NASA, on the other hand, has a set of historicised guidelines that are used to assess whether the threat of a close passage of debris is sufficient to justify evasive action for the safety of the International Space Station (ISS) and its crew or even for the very preservation of operational satellites in Earth orbit through the use of sophisticated sensors deployed in the Earth’s crust and linked to continuous “satellite inspections and monitoring”. Thus, NASA is able to determine and map the extent of objects (satellites and debris) in the “lower atmosphere”.