TRASH EVERYWHERE

Many people know that pollution is a big problem on planet Earth. What many people don’t know is that pollution has become a problem in outer space too. Years of space exploration have left tonnes of “space junk” in orbit around the planet.

According to BBC News, there are more than 22 000 pieces of junk floating around the Earth. And these are just the items that we can see by telescopes or via radar. There are probably millions of other smaller pieces of junk that we can’t even see.

Various junk items, like bits of old space rockets or satellites, move around the planet at very high speeds, so fast that even a very small piece could break important satellites or become dangerous to people, particularly astronauts. If the tiniest piece of junk crashed into a spacecraft, it could cause serious damage. That’s because the faster an object moves, the greater the impact of the object collides with something else.

To help minimise additional space junk, countries around the world have agreed to limit the time their space tools stay in orbit to 25 years. Each tool must be built to fall safely back to Earth. The upper parts of the atmosphere will burn up.

“In our opinion, the problem is very challenging, and it's quite urgent as well,” said Marco Castronuovo, an Italian Space Agency researcher who is working to solve the problem. “The time to act is now; as we go further in time we will need to remove more and more fragments,” he says.