The Hill News

This week’s National Space Symposium galvanized the aerospace community around a theme critical to our planet: space situational awareness, which â€" in short â€" is an understanding of the escalating danger of space junk and the risk this poses to the growing traffic in Earth’s orbit.
 
This space debris isn’t just the humorous â€" astronaut gloves, for instance â€" dropped inadvertently from shuttles past, floating harmlessly by the International Space Station. Rather, these bits of debris include defunct satellites, fragments left behind from earlier orbital collisions, or even lost tools from astronaut repair jobs that hurl through space at speeds up to 17,000 miles per hour. At this rate, even a small particle can pose dire consequence to lives and infrastructure should it collide with one of our critical satellites.

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