![]() He is interested in developing technical solutions for managing the space debris problem and encouraging sustainable practices in space utilization. McKnight is a member of the International Academy of Astronautics' Space Debris Committee, where he contributes to the development of position papers on the topic of space debris mitigation. The Russians were using kerosene or hydrazine, which are lower energy chemical propellants that needed a bigger rocket for the same job."ĭarren McKnight is a Senior Technical Fellow at LeoLabs, a private California-based firm mapping orbital traffic. And so a smaller rocket can do the same job. "This fuel provides higher miles per gallon. "The U.S., for example, would typically use the Centaur upper stage, which uses liquid hydrogen," McDowell said. and even China rely on massive first stages that fall back to Earth shortly after launch and use a comparatively small upper stage to deposit their payload in orbit. McDowell added that the rocket stage problem, while not unique to Russian technology, has to do with the launcher design that Russia's predecessor, the Soviet Union, frequently went for. "If you worry about scenarios such as the Kessler syndrome, the probabilities are dominated by two big things hitting each other, because that would generate by far the most debris that then can trigger a chain reaction," Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a leading space debris expert, told. The sheer size of these rockets means that a collision would produce an enormous amount of space debris fragments that would turn the bad neighborhood into an even worse one, possibly triggering the Kessler syndrome, a dreaded scenario of unstoppable cascades of collisions such as the one depicted in the 2013 Oscar-winning movie "Gravity." It would not be unexpected to have one of these rocket stages be involved in a collision very soon." "They're like a big yellow school bus without a driver, without brakes," McKnight said. In the meantime, the rockets continue crossing paths with thousands of other defunct spacecraft and millions of debris fragments. From this altitude, it will take centuries for the debris to come down. LeoLabs currently monitors 18 of these rocket stages that circle Earth in one of the "bad neighborhoods" at the altitude of around 520 miles (840 kilometers). The derelict objects, on the contrary, have no ability to maneuver away from each other."Īmong these old derelict objects, the SL-16, a giant 9.9-ton (9 metric tons), 36-foot-long (11 meters) upper stage of Russia's Zenit rocket, is the source of the greatest apprehension. ![]() "They have a propulsion system that makes them very agile, and they can make collision-avoidance maneuvers. "Constellations may have hundreds to thousands of satellites, but they are quite good at orchestrating themselves," Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at private debris monitoring firm LeoLabs, told in an interview. ![]() Here we review what type of stuff the experts fear the most. Both of these incidents involved objects that are at the top of space debris experts' list of hazards. 6 revealed that in early January a mysterious Russian satellite broke apart into 85 fragments large enough to be tracked from Earth.īoth of these incidents happened in areas that experts refer to as bad neighborhoods, regions of low Earth orbit too high above the planet to benefit much from the cleaning effects of its atmosphere. The incident, described as a close call "worst case scenario," could have spawned thousands of dangerous debris fragments that would have stayed in orbit for centuries. 27, space debris researchers looked on in horror as two huge pieces of space junk - a decades-old upper stage of a Russian rocket and a long-defunct Russian satellite - came within 20 feet (6 meters) or so of each other. In just the past month, the goings-on in near-Earth space have twice made headlines and prompted experts to call for action.
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