Space Junk is literally Making the Sky Brighter and Difficult to Study Space

Moon seems us shining and makes the sky brighter at night because it reflects the sun rays incident on it. But the space junk which consists of many gigantic spacecraft parts and other man-made things is making the sky brighter and brighter as compared to natural brightness in the sky, as it reflects the sun radiations considerably. Due to this, the study of space from the earth is going to be very difficult, as it is enough now.

Starlink Making it Even Worse

One of the major problems astronomers faced is the mega-constellations of satellites for providing high-speed internet as Starlink provided by SpaceX. Elon musk’s company has already sent more than 1,300 satellites into earth’s orbit since 2018 and the number is increasing day by day.

Not only SpaceX there are many more companies like AMAZON, ONE WEB keeps their eyes for having their own constellations in future. This will significantly increase the number of working satellites in orbit which currently last year. As these satellites are used in telecommunication, navigation and have a number of other applications but also contribute to increasing space junk significantly. Also making it difficult to study astronomy

Space Junk

With satellites in space, space junk is the other thing that contributing in making the sky brighter. Thousands of man made things from damaged satellites to rusted bolts, nuts also putting the working of other satellites at risk. This number of space junk is going to be in millions and billions of small objects counted, and this whole together have a mass of about 6 thousand tons.

Every space junk from gigantic to small size is worsening the condition because of the solar radiation that is reflected from their surface and that reflected radiation spreads all around in the atmosphere, making it difficult to observe astronomical targets and to study astronomy. These reflected radiations also increase the difficulty to study the cosmos.

According to many researchers, satellites and their garbage in space ruin the astronomical images by producing bright streaks that are difficult to distinguish as these streaks are often brighter than the objects of astrophysical interest making it difficult or sometimes impossible to get the clear image and that sometimes is converting to every time slowly but significantly.

Many ways are developed to clean the space junk that not only making the sky brighter but also affect the working of other satellites but it seems that as far now none of them work significantly as the difference is very large between how much space junk is created every day and how much is cleaned.

German research center for geoscience light pollution expert Christopher Kyba says ‘‘thankfully, there is reason to hope that engineers figure out how to solve the junk problem’’. He did not work on the study but said to the newspaper that, ‘‘he is optimistic that engineers working on ways to remove space junk from earth’s orbit will figure it out in future’’.

Thus there is something hope that human will get some techniques to clean the space junk in upcoming years and it is very important to clean it as the difficulties in working of satellites around earth’s orbit, to study astronomy and many more are increasing continuously and significantly. That’s all for now, be in touch for further interesting facts and articles