Pollution in Space

Scientists are warning that the amount of space junk floating around in space is becoming a danger to the International Space Station (ISS). Experts say that it’s time to start cleaning it up. It was reported by America’s space agency, NASA, that there are around 22,000 objects in orbit that are big enough to track. It means these useless objects will not disappear from the solar system by themselves and they might damage space crafts in missions if we do not start the cleaning business soon. These junk objects include things like spent booster rockets and old satellites. It’s also said that there are countless smaller pieces of scrap that could damage the ISS, space ships travelling to it, and multi-million dollar satellites. It is such a big problem that the ISS occasionally has to move out of the way to avoid being hit. Donald Kessler who is a retired NASA scientist said, “We’ve lost control of the environment.”
Over the past few decades, many plans have been introduced by space agencies to solve this problem. There are new agreements to decrease the amount of new space junk. These agreements are supposed to ensure
that anything sent into orbit eventually falls back to Earth and burns up. However, in the past four years, the amount of space junk has doubled. In 2007, China blew up a satellite in a missile test, and in 2009 two satellites crashed while they were in orbit. These two events changed everything and made previous agreements out of date. There have been several suggestions on how to clear the junk. These include launching large magnets or putting giant nets into space to catch dangerous items.