There’s A Cloud Of Space Junk Consisting Of Hundreds Of Rocket Pieces Floating Around Our Planet
On August 6, a Chinese rocket launched from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center to deliver the first 18 satellites in orbit for Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology’s Qianfan (Thousand Sails) broadband network.
The megaconstellation of satellites will eventually include 1,296 satellites, and there are plans to host up to 14,000 spacecraft.
The satellites were successfully delivered to low Earth orbit at an altitude of approximately 500 miles. But according to the United States Space Command (USSPACECOM), the rocket broke apart shortly after, creating a cloud of debris consisting of hundreds of pieces around our planet.
“USSPACECOM can confirm the breakup of a Long March 6A rocket launched on Aug. 6, 2024, resulting in over 300 pieces of trackable debris in low Earth orbit,” said the organization in a statement on August 8.
“USSPACECOM has observed no immediate threats and continues to conduct routine conjunction assessments to support the safety and sustainability of the space domain.”
When the incident first occurred, Slingshot Aerospace’s Global Sensor Network was tracking more than 50 pieces of debris. Slingshot Aerospace is a company based in California that is dedicated to making space safe and sustainable.
Then, the amount of tracked debris changed, with the U.S. Space Command saying they were tracking over 300 pieces.
Now, tracking organization LeoLabs has announced that there are at least 700 debris fragments from the rocket breakup event.
Trackable debris generally refers to any object that is at least four inches in diameter. Many of the shards from the new debris cloud are too small to monitor.
Mike Mareen – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
Furthermore, everything in low Earth orbit, a region densely populated by satellites, travels at 17,500 miles per hour.
So, if any of the space junk crashes into another object, like a satellite, it could cause a number of problems, such as adding to the debris already in space.
Because of the altitude where the breakup occurred, the space junk will likely stay there for several years.
Some of it may even remain for decades. It isn’t the first time that a Long March 6A rocket, which weighs about 12,800 pounds without propellant, has exploded in low Earth orbit.
On November 12, 2022, another of these rockets broke apart shortly after delivering the Yunhai-3 weather satellite.
That event resulted in 533 trackable debris fragments that were distributed between 198 miles and 932 miles.
An analysis revealed that the breakup was caused by an issue with the spacecraft’s propulsion system.
According to the European Space Agency, there are roughly 40,500 pieces of debris floating around in space that are at least four inches wide and 130 million shards that are at least one millimeter in diameter. Those numbers will only continue to climb as more countries launch spacecraft.
“Events like this highlight the importance of adherence to existing space debris mitigation guidelines to reduce the creation of new space debris and underscore the need for robust space domain awareness capabilities to rapidly detect, track, and catalog newly launched space objects so they can be screened for potential conjunctions,” said Audrey Schaffer, the vice president of strategy and policy at Slingshot.
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