If you saw the film Gravity,
then you know that space debris can be very harmful and deadly. Some scientists
advise that the dirt in Earth's orbit may have touched a risky "tipping
point." But to verify this point, here's an image from artist Michael
Najjar that displays every single bit of real-life garbage in our orbit. The sketch below is titled simply "Space
Debris I,"
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Najjar describes it thusly:
"space debris I"
visualizes the collection of defunct objects now in orbit around the earth
which includes everything from spent rocket stages and old satellites to
fragments from disintegration, erosion, and collisions. There are now about
600,000 objects larger than 1 cm in orbit circulating at a speed of
approximately 28,000 km an hour and posing a serious threat to satellites,
space stations and operational spaceflights. Drawn from a data archive,
each spherule in the picture represents a real object orbiting in space. The
visualization was realized in collaboration with the Institute of Aerospace
Systems – TU Braunschweig Germany, the world's leading authority on the
tracking of space debris.”
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