14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists have recently found a correlation between the fact that the Sun is undergoing a period of solar maximum and the chance that space junk in low-Earth orbit (LEO) has of becoming even more dangerous to spacecraft and astronauts leaving Earth.
In more than 50 years of spaceflight, people have put massive amounts of debris in space. These include pieces of spent equipment, shards of paints, screws, electronics fragments, spent rocket stages and decommissioned satellites, among others.
All these objects are moving through space at thousands of miles per hour, and are capable of inflicting catastrophic damage on anything they encounter, including spacecraft. A shard of paint can easily travel through the entire International Space Station (ISS), if the two meet.
In the past week alone, the orbital facility had to be removed from its standard orbit twice, because it ran the risk of colliding with such an object. According to experts, instances of this happening will only increase in the future.
Things will get especially worse by 2012-2013, they add, because that is when the Sun reaches its next period of maximum activity. The reason why the star influences the behavior of space debris is that it helps inflate Earth's atmosphere by a small margin.
This leads to objects abandoned in space experiencing a higher atmospheric drag than usual, which in turns causes a change in their orbits. They become unstable, and travel to lower altitudes, where most critical space assets are located.
“I think that over the next two or three years, this is going to happen more often,” says Gene Stansbery, referring to instances in which spacecraft will need to take active steps to avoid space junk impacts.
“When the solar cycle is ramped up, that's typically when we get a lot of this rain-down from higher altitudes,” the expert says about the unwelcome visitors.
The expert holds an appointment at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where he is the program manager of the NASA Orbital Debris Office, Space reports.
According to the expert, things are made even more dangerous by the fact that the ISS cannot be readily moved from its orbit, except if it has about 72 hours of notice beforehand.
In one of the latest two instances when it had to have its orbit changes, experts at Mission Control did not benefit from such a warning, and this forced astronauts into their Russian-built Soyuz lifeboats.
This if the fifth time they have to do this. What it means is that, in the event of a hull breach, they seal the hatch between the capsules and the ISS, and evacuate the $100 billion facility, that took more than 10 years to build.