Around 70 years of space exploration started from unmanned to manned vehicle in space for the scientific data. Today, most of the older man-made materials such as abandoned pieces of old satellites and used rocket stages are no longer functional (non-operational). These abandoned pieces of man-made space material are still orbiting in the low Earth orbit. On some of these occasions, they collide with other dead pieces of man-made space material which produces some more debris.
What is Space Debris?
The term debris implies that the ones that have been destroyed or broken up When it comes to the Space Debris, it referred to the natural debris found in the solar system, such as asteroids, comets, and meteorids (a small rocky or metallic body in outer space).
What causes Space Debris?
The space debris is comprised of not only broken pieces of asteroids, comets, and meteorids but also abandoned pieces of old satellites and used rocket stages including the rest of rocket fuel, paint flakes, frozen liquid coolant, etc.
According to the report of United States Space Surveillance Network, there are more than 13,000 pieces of space debris larger than 10 cm (4 inches), about 200,000 pieces between 1 and 10 cm (0.4 and 4 inches) and also predicted there were millions of pieces smaller than 1 cm
How Space Debris will be the operational satellite?
These debris travels at a high speed which is up to 8 km per second which can be both manned and unmanned spaceflight. Most of the debris can be found geostationary orbit above equator.
The attack of the collision came into existence when the operational satellite and a piece of space debris took place on July 24, 1996 at a fragment from the upper stage of a European Ariane rocket collided with Cerise (French microsatellite). This collide is partially damaged by the Cerise, but still functional The real threat came in light when Iridium 33 (communications satellite owned by the American company Motorola), collided with Cosmos 2251 that destroyed the operational satellite.
