A brief inventory of space debris includes: a spatula, a glove, a mirror, a bag with astronaut tools, spent rocket stages, bolts, paint chips, defunct spacecraft, and around 3,000 dead satellites, orbiting Earth at speeds of roughly 18,000 m.p.h.
Most space junk is moving in low Earth orbit (LEO), within an altitude of about 100 to 1,200 miles. This is the same space where the world's 3,000 satellites operate that power telecommunications and GPS technologies.
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Some space rubble is natural micrometeoroids, like the fragment that struck the starboard payload bay radiator of the STS-115 flight in 2006.
Even tiny, untrackable micro-debris can become a problem. A paint fragment chipped off a spacecraft can move at nearly ten times the speed of a bull...
A problem NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler outlined in 1978: As space becomes more packed with spacecraft and debris, collisions become more likely, creating more debris that could trigger a chain reaction of collisions. There is a possibility that near-Earth space can become a shrapnel field.
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