Fear of ‘Kessler SyndromeIt’s getting worse as there are more than 130 million pieces of debris orbiting the Earth that could smash into satellites at any time.
Named after American astronomer Donald Kessler – who first warned of its dangers 1978- Kessler Syndrome is a condition caused by an empty pulse.
This hypothetical “domino effect” can cause the space to expand, as each collision creates more debris in contact with surrounding platforms, increasing future opportunities.
The result would be a cloud of space orbiting the Earth, blocking ground-based telescopes and cutting off all technology that relies on satellites, including weather forecasting, GPS and television broadcasting.
Paul Lynam, an astronomer at the University of California‘s Lick Observatory, said that the event will not be a ‘distant, foreign phenomenon,’ but will ‘affect everyone on earth.’ And a new study suggests it could happen before 2050.
Currently, in Low-Earth orbit (LEO), about 1,000 warning strikes are issued every day to warn telecoms, governments, scientists and others about the dangers of their hardware.
Scientists have warned that space debris could also interfere with Earth’s magnetic field, exposing all life to deadly cosmic rays.
Former NASA scientist Sierra Solter-Hunt told DailyMail.com that particles from broken satellites, rocket boosters and other space debris can ‘disrupt or trap the magnetic field’ that prevents Earth’s atmosphere from escaping.
Named by astronaut Donald Kessler – who first warned of its dangers in 1978 – Kessler Syndrome actually describes a ‘space junk’ chain reaction, in which hardware smashing into each other in orbit creates runaway destruction. Above: NASA map of known space objects
Former NASA scientist Sierra Solter-Hunt has warned that cheap ‘star clusters’ like Elon Musk’s Starlink could disrupt the Earth’s magnetic field – exposing all life to deadly cosmic rays. He was invited to investigate the ‘abundance of metal dust from the aerospace industry’
Although Solter-Hunt recognized that it is ‘very difficult,’ if suspended metal dust can cause ‘atmospheric stripping’ such as history of Mars and Mercury.
But the results would have been blasphemous, turning Earth into the lifeless place that its celestial neighbors are today.
‘It’s all very interesting metal scraps,’ as he said he told DailyMail.com‘they are all settled in one place.’
This area includes ionosphere and plasmaspherewhich have already been formed by high-energy ions including oxygen, hydrogen and helium gases circulating in the conducting plasma: the result of the bombardment from the cosmic rays of the sun.
Solter-Hunt also said that the interaction of electricity and magnetism between the air generated by electricity and a fine cloud of metal waste, unlike a certain short circuit within the complex and faulty wires, can cause many problems and dangers.
‘Because all this metal debris is building up in the plasma to begin with,’ he said, ‘there are a number of ways that this dust and debris can cause it to charge.’
“I think we need to stop using the ionosphere and the atmosphere as repositories for cosmic waste immediately,” Solter-Hunt advised. ‘I haven’t studied at all except for my papers and a few other papers that are starting to come out.’
After working on NASA’s Stardust probe in 2012, Single-Hunt spent three years at the US Air Force Research Laboratory.
Solter-Hunt based estimates that Musk’s SpaceX is burning 2,755 lbs (1.3 tons) of cyberspace debris on Earth every hour, creating ‘conductive particulate’ metal in orbit. Thousands of Starlink satellites are now above Earth
Large pieces of the SpaceX Crew-1 spacecraft were also found in a field in Australia in 2022. A fragment of debris (pictured) shows its carbon fiber structure and steel bolts.
“We’re close to 10,000 satellites (in orbit) right now, but in 10 to 15 years it could be 100,000,” Solter-Hunt said.
‘By the time we get to 100,000 I think it will be too late,’ he said, ‘depending on the unplanned geoengineering experiments that will take place.’
Only about 40,500 pieces of the debris are larger than four inches, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). Most are between 0.4 and 0.04 inches long.
Seattle-based scientist Sierra Solter-Hunt (pictured) believes that floating, metallic particles could be in the upper ionosphere – 50 to 400 miles above Earth – weakening its magnetic field.
But most of the ‘spacecraft’ are moving very fast, on Earth traveling at 18,000 mph or about seven times the speed of a bullet, according to NASA.
Although only 650 major collisions have been reported since 1957, ‘the number of space objects we have launched in the last four years has increased dramatically,’ according to planetary scientist Vishnu Reddy.
“Unless we do something, we are in danger of making an entire part of our environment unusable,” said Dan Baker, director of the University of ColoradoAtmospheric and Space Physics Lab, warned at the December meeting.
But according to Reddy, a professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, the risk of dangerous space environments is worse in high and stable ‘geosynchronous orbits.’
So called because the satellites in this orbit fly at the same point on Earth, orbiting the same planets as they orbit, geosynchronous orbit (GEO) has billions of dollars in public and private communications. satellites.
Complex systems including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) weather tracking GOES satellite, Pentagon spy towerDirectTV and SiriusXM satellite radio both operate in GEO approximately 22,236 miles in space.
And unlike orbiting craft in LEO, space-based platforms in GEO are unlikely to burn up on their way back to Earth any time soon.
A two-pound cylinder from a NASA battery (pictured) launched by the International Space Station in 2021 fell into a man’s home in Naples, Florida three years later – in April this year. This story is just one interesting example of the dangers posed by air pollutants
“The most dangerous place where this (a ‘Kessler Syndrome’ phenomenon) can happen is at GEO,” Reddy said. CNN. ‘Because we don’t have a quick cleaning method.’
Unnecessary and dangerous debris in GEO can remain in orbit for thousands of years – increasing the risk of a catastrophic collision with the orbiter.
Some even fear that the onset of the ‘Kessler Syndrome’ may be a slow-moving train wreck, where orbital billiard balls have already begun to move, even after humanity has suspended all its space programs.
Kessler’s original experiment in 1978 provided a picture of how the current planetary impact, probably too small to be tracked from Earth today, is slowly expanding — and adding more debris to the system.
“If Kessler’s syndrome is going to happen and we’re going to start seeing some kind of pulse, we’re going to see it in very small cells,” plasma physicist David Malaspina told the December AGU meeting in DC.
There are more than 130 million pieces of so-called ‘space junk,’ in orbit according to the European Space Agency, but only tens of thousands are being tracked (pictured)
“This is our canary in the coal mine,” Malaspina, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, advised.
UC-Boulder physicist Dan Baker compared what has happened to an economic situation called the ‘tragedy of the common man.’
“Simply put, the tragedy of the commons is that people who act rationally and individually according to their own interests will destroy the common good, even if this is against the interests of the group,” Baker said.
“And I believe we’re seeing the challenges of the commons playing out in Earth’s orbit right before our eyes,” he told AGU, according to Space.com.
