SPACE JUNK By Roisin
Space junk is trash that floats in space. Some orbits the Earth while other trash justs floats around. 73% of tracked debris in LEO. It is estimated that hundreds of millions of pieces of space trash are now floating in our region of the solar system. About 1,000 times per day, debris and satellites pass less than 5 miles from each other! The worst part of space trash is the danger it poses to satellites. Many satellites have been damaged because of space trash. Since Earth’s gravitational field brings in a lot of space trash and lowers it into LEO
A Weather Satellite
On February 10, 2009, the 15,000 miles per hour collision of the private Iridium 33 satellite and Cosmos 2251, a Russian military spacecraft, left a trail of about 2,000 pieces of LEO debris. Also, in 2007, China internationally destroyed one of their weather satellites in space. This event led to a 900-piece cloud of debris. Together, these two events combined increased the number of junk in LEO by more than 60%!
LEO has the highest concentration of space debris. Space Junk around Earth in 2013