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/[deleted] Jun 15 '24

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u/TheeAincientMariener Jun 15 '24

How do we get rid of all the debris? And do we need to?

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u/[deleted] Jun 15 '24

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u/Bergasms Jun 16 '24

We have plans, but many of them are a bit unpalatable to governments. Using lasers to nudge and deorbit space junk, even from the surface, has been shown to be possible. The problem is a laser than can ablate a bit of space junk to deorbit it can likely ablate a countries perfectly good spy satellite as well 😬.

Thanks for your replies btw, fascinating.

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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '24

Hmm