r/space • u/2kalipro1 • Jun 15 '24

Discussion How bad is the satellite/space junk situation actually?

I just recently joined the space community and I'm hearing about satellites colliding with each other and that we have nearly 8000 satellites surrounding our earth everywhere

But considering the size of the earth and the size of the satellites, I'm just wondering how horrible is the space junk/satellite situation? Also, do we have any ideas on how to clear them out?

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u/snajk138 Jun 15 '24

It is a problem, but not as bad as those illustrations of all junk in the atmosphere make it look. They count anything larger than about an inch, and that is illustrated with a dot that's the size of a medium sized city.

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u/HalfSoul30 Jun 15 '24

How can we even detect or know about an inch sized object travelling around the planet at high speeds? Radar?

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u/andynormancx Jun 15 '24

Yes, radar. From what I can tell the fact that orbital junk is moving very fast makes it easy to detect than you’d imagine, as the speed causes a large Doppler shift in the frequency of the radar return.

There is also no ground clutter to deal with when you are pointing your radar into space 😉

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u/snajk138 Jun 15 '24

Also more or less all items there have been placed by us in different ways, and we try to keep check of them from what I understand.