With a recent satellite collision still fresh on minds, participants at a meeting in the Austrian capital this week are discussing ways to deal with space debris — junk that is clogging up the orbit around the Earth. Not to forget the Pentagon initiative to target space junk and blow it to smithereens. Of the 18,000 tracked objects traveling around the Earth that are larger than 10cm (4 inches), only about 900 are active satellites. The rest is debris—everything from fragments of paint to entire dead satellites and bits of old rockets. Smashed bits of space equipment orbit along with items dropped by astronauts, including tools and the odd glove. In the 1970s one NASA scientist pointed out that debris from one collision could go on to create a second, which would create still more debris and more collisions, and so on. Eventually, an entire orbit would be rendered useless for generations. The orbits around the Earth are too valuable to let this happen, and something needs to be done to either prevent or eradicate this problem all together.

Via [Gizmodo]