At
the United Nations Geneva Meeting in 2019, the President and Co-Founder of
BlockchainArmy, Erol User, urged all institutions, governments, as
well as private sector corporations to join in the initiative called
S.O.S, short for Save Our Space. The initiative is an effort to organize a space waste management system.
In
his speech at the meeting in Switzerland, Dec. 14, Erol User
said that now is the time for everyone to begin cooperating "to
guarantee economically vital spaceflight" to facilitate
innovative service offerings for the citizens along with future space
developments. Continuing further, he stated that we need to keep up
the dream of future exploration while also combining continual
technological development and environmental awareness.
Not
much needs to be said when it comes to how attracted humans have been
towards space since the beginning of time. It has always been a very
exciting element and has attracted several explorations through spacecraft, rockets, satellites, etc. The intentional or
accidental explosion of space objects, flecks of paint from space
objects, residual elements from space missions, etc., all end up
floating at very high speed (some 18,000 miles per hour) in an
orbit that surrounds our earth called "Low Earth Orbit" or
LEO. For instance, the deliberate destruction of the Chinese Fengyun-1C
spacecraft in 2007 and the accidental collision of an American and a
Russian spacecraft in 2009 are two of the main reasons why LEO is
turning into a space garbage orbit. These two incidents have
dominated LEO's space debris levels by approximately 70 percent.
Over the years, these leftover space objects have contributed to space junk or space debris. Space debris is a growing issue for humankind today, which can have its claws dug deep into the future generations.
Space
debris is environmentally bad as we are leaving unnatural objects in
space. Eventually, the satellites will need to come down into the
earth's atmosphere, which poses a high possibility of them burning
into flames. A much worse scenario is dealing with the leftover fuel
in those satellites leading them to explode in earth's atmosphere.
For
simple purposes such as communication and weather reports, manmade
satellites are orbiting earth in geostationary orbit,
which is 35,000 kilometers above the planet. These satellites are
usually blasted into a "graveyard orbit” when they reach the
end of their service life, which is around 36,000 km above earth. In
the past, the blasting episodes were less and manageable, but with
growing technology, space pollution is only becoming a burdening
issue. Researchers from Australia are currently monitoring
approximately 29,000 pieces of space junk.
One
company looking into the space debris problem is Electro Optic
Systems of Australia. The company's Chief Executive and Technical
Director Professor Craig Smith is trying to come up with a
"high-powered, high-precision laser," according to reports.
This laser is under developed at the Space Environment Research
Centre. The ambition is to push space junk out of the way and prevent
collisions with other satellites. Another use of the laser is to
destroy space junk eventually. The laser is expected to be fully
functional in three years.
“It
is a serious issue. We have oceans and rivers, and we pollute them
until they become almost unusable. We have done exactly the same with
space. We have left junk everywhere,” Smith said. An approximation
from NASA says there is 6,000 tons of space debris orbiting in the
LEO.
