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You are preparing a presentation for the school science club, using this
article from a scientific website.
Reaching a Tipping Point: What to Do About the Problem of Space Junk?
For over fifty years, slowly at first, but with increasing intensity, we've
been sending objects up into orbit. Most of these items begin life as useful
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devices, such as the thousands of satellites that bring us information and give
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us our 21st century communication, but even these eventually fall out of use
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or break. These satellites, living or dead, share an increasingly crowded layer,
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known as near-earth orbit, with rocket parts, tools, and pieces of metal from
objects that have already crashed together and broken into pieces.
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This garbage poses a threat both (to working" satellites of which there
are thousands), and (to the earth itself.) For example, in 2009 a disused Russian
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module crashed into an active US satellite) destroying both and forcing the
International Space Station to change course to avoid the thousands of broken
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pieces. While most junk that falls back to earth burns up in the atmosphere.
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larger chunks can occasionally hit the ground, posing a threat to people and
Pieces that do burn up] leave pollutants in the atmosphere, such as
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aluminum particles, which can destroy the ozone layer
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It's clear that removing space junk is vital if we are to maintain and
build upon our current satellite network. The problem has been discussed
continuously since the 1970s, when Donald Kessler, a senior scientist at NASA
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described a scenario (later known as Kessler syndrome) (where a runaway
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others more and more likely. While the 2009 incident may be the first large
cycle of collisions begins, with each collision creating more debris, making
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near-earth collision, it is thought that Kessler syndrome has already begun
with smaller objects.
Since Kessler syndrome was first described, many solutions have been
proposed, from using lasers to robotic garbage collectors, but cost has been an
obstacle to most. In 2021, a Japan-based company named Astroscale launched
ELSA-d (short for "End-of-Life Services by Astroscale Demonstration") to show
