On January 12, 2001, a Saudi citizen told the police that while he was traveling in the desert about 270 km outside the capital, Riyadh, he found a strange, spherical, black metal body with a heavy weight that was not surrounded by any footprints. Immediately the Saudi authorities moved to find what we knew (1) Later, it was a motor for a NASA piece of rocket.

This piece is called the "payload assist module", and it is used to propel satellites into their orbits around the planet, and then it was supposed to return again and fall to Earth, where it is directed to an ocean, but this time It entered the atmosphere catastrophically, and the result was that part of its cargo did not burn and went forward to fall in the kingdom, and fortunately it fell in a remote area that does not have a population.

The space piece that fell in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2001

Of course, we remember this incident, which was very popular at the time, due to the current global "trend" around the Chinese missile (2) "Long March 5B", which part of its remnants swims - while writing these words - at an altitude of about 170 - 273 km above the surface of the earth in a line that extends from New York to Madrid to Beijing and then southern Chile and New Zealand, and through this path it passes over a number of countries in the Arab world.

It is believed that this piece will enter the atmosphere uncontrollably in less than a day, and while it weighs about 21 tons, it is the heaviest among the space waste that has entered our atmosphere for several decades, and this is the point that has called the attention of some specialists in At this range, there were concerns that the denser parts of the two main engines of the missile would escape and head to the surface of the Earth. In normal condition, the entire mass of residue would usually burn out due to friction with the atmosphere, and would rarely fall to the ground.

The problem with this type of accidents is that we cannot expect the timing and position of these space remnants to fall, for example, in the case of the Chinese missile (3), but it can be generalized to all similar cases, it is expected that it will fall at dawn on May 9 with a margin of error. Its amount is about 8 full hours, and while the missile itself revolves around the entire body of the Earth every hour and a half only, this simply means that it may fall anywhere, and we do not have enough time to control the matter.

Chinese missile "Long March 5B - Long March 5B"

But there is no doubt that the most dangerous event (4) in this scale was in 1978, while the United States' SkyLab space station was swimming in orbit around the Earth, NASA scientists neglected to calculate the effect of solar radiation on the atmosphere that drives it to inflation, which is what Influenced the "Skylab" to start gradually descending to Earth, and NASA scientists had nothing but waiting for the disaster.

Indeed, the main parts of the vehicle burned out in the atmosphere, but other parts remained that fell in the Indian Ocean and Western Australia, no deaths or injuries were recorded, but the Australian city of Perth administration sent a $ 400 bill to NASA as a fine for throwing garbage out of place!

Skylab before the fall

Of course you might see it as a delicious joke worth telling to a friend who loves space science, but those bits falling to Earth are actually called (5) "space litter," and what is happening now with regard to the remains of a Chinese missile, or what happened to the payload assist unit or "skylab" is not In fact, unsafe entry into the atmosphere and access to Earth are more common than you think, the most recent of which was last April (6) when small pieces of the remnants of a SpaceX missile landed on a farm in Washington.

According to a study (7) conducted by researchers from Aerospace Corporation, a US non-profit organization that provides technical guidance on space missions to military, civilian and commercial clients, more than 40 space pieces with a mass of about one ton fall annually to the planet, but it goes beyond that to What is deeper.

At that point, let us consider a statement (8) by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in March 2019 in which he proudly said that India had succeeded in launching the first anti-satellite missile, launched from north-eastern India, to travel a distance of about 280 km into space and meet with The path of an Indian satellite called "Microsat R", to smash it into small pieces.

This type of operation requires extreme degrees of accuracy to conduct it, and what India did was actually a big addition to its capabilities in a range it is trying to master and show its capabilities, which is the design, launch and operation of satellites at the best possible prices in the world, within a trade that has so far reached about 270 billion dollars !

Despite this, this process raised the attention of space researchers, as well as politicians in several countries, to a big problem (9), which is that the debris of this satellite, which weighs about a ton, will spread in space and may collide with one of the working satellites. For a country and completely destroyed it, which may cause serious earthly problems.

At that point, let's keep in mind that these remaining pieces of satellite debris, no matter how small they are, are orbiting the Earth at a speed of about 7 kilometers every second, it is a tremendous speed that gives a piece of lead a little more than a centimeter in diameter big enough to travel Seven to eight centimeters inside a slab of lead.

In fact, there are more than 20 thousand "machines" that ground-based observatories permanently track in the space surrounding the Earth, of which only about 2,500 working satellites, and the rest are space waste: inoperative satellites or the remnants of rockets launched into space, and some of them have caused Accidents, the most famous of which is what happened (10) to the American satellite "Iridium 33" when in 2009 it collided with a non-working Russian satellite called "Cosmos 2251" at an altitude of about 500 km above the plains of Siberia, and it crashed in one moment!

This crash released debris of about a ton and a half, which is not the only case.

But non-working satellites are things large enough to be tracked, as satellites can over time develop techniques to avoid collision, and there are already (11) successful cases in this regard, as the US satellite "Fermi" team managed several years ago to remove it. A short distance from the collision course of a non-working satellite via a specially designed light propulsion rocket.

The success of this maneuver saved the Americans tens of millions of dollars, but it could not succeed every time.

But the biggest problem has always been the tiny, untraceable pieces that can damage fragile parts, such as: solar panels, optics, or glass in windows, and most importantly, astronauts.

In fact, if you were an astronaut in the International Space Station and decided to be silent and anxious to hear your surroundings, then you would hear sounds of colliding - from time to time - with the station's body to small objects colliding with it.

According to (12) the European Space Agency, it has been estimated that there are more than 128 million pieces of space garbage with a diameter smaller than 1 cm, about 90 thousand pieces with a diameter of 1-10 cm, and about 34 thousand pieces with a diameter greater than 10 cm, in orbit around the Earth as of In January 2019, this makes it about 70% more likely that a satellite will collide with any piece of space garbage, but many of those pieces are too small to damage the satellite.

However, it will not stop there.

For example, there is a small chance that one of the pieces of space falling to the Earth, such as the remains of a Chinese missile, will hit a person below, because the area of ​​land on the Earth is only about 29%, while water represents more than two-thirds of the surface of our planet, besides that Most of our cities are accumulating in minute points on the surface of this land, so all incidents of unsafe entry into the atmosphere - so far - have not recorded any deaths or injuries.

But in the future, that may change. We are currently witnessing a massive revolution in space science. Dozens of rockets are launched annually, and there are more satellites.

Let's just note the Arab case. About 15 Arab satellites were launched into space in our history until 2010, but the number of Arab satellites that launched into space from this year until now is close to 40.

That now, satellites now possess utmost importance, not only in communications and Earth observation to conduct important geographical, demographic and agricultural surveys, but also for military purposes, this means an exponential escalation of the risk, especially since we do not yet have the full capabilities to control the projection of the remnants of these operations to a planet Earth, in addition to this that our daily dependence on satellites has become necessary in our lives, this means that losing contact with one of those machines on top, due to space garbage, may be a very critical problem for some countries on Earth.

For this reason, the problem of the Chinese missile, although it is used by the US administration for political purposes, including the attack on the Chinese space project (which is really promising), but it is only an indication of a bigger problem as long as specialists in this area know that it is heading to a moment of explosion and hope that it will not cause a disaster, one day. After a day, political and scientific voices are rising calling for radical solutions to it. The well-known American physicist "Neil DeGrasse Tyson" stated (13) several years ago that failure to work on this problem may prevent us at some point from traveling to space easily, as it may pose a danger Adult on astronauts.

Simply put, our litter, which we dumped out of the Earth, could lock us up on its surface!

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Sources

  • PAM-D Debris Falls in Saudi Arabia

  • Will it fall over our heads? .. The Chinese Space Administration is having difficulty returning a missile safely to Earth

  • CZ-5B ROCKET BODY (ID 48275) Reentry Prediction

  • The Summer The Skylab Space Station Crashed, 41 Years Later

  • About space debris

  • SpaceX rocket debris lands on man's farm in Washington

  • LARGE CONSTELLATION DISPOSAL HAZARDS

  • India's Anti-Satellite Test Created Dangerous Debris, NASA Chief Says

  • Previous source

  • Consequences of the Collision of Consequences of the Collision of Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251

  • The Day NASA's Fermi Dodged a 1.5-ton Bullet

  • Space debris by the numbers

  • Neil deGrasse Tyson on Space Junk