Space junk could start conflicts

The increasingly crowded space in Earth’s low orbit could set the stage for an international armed conflict, says a new study.

Researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences warn that accidents stemming from the steady rise in space junk floating around the planet could incite political rows and even warfare, with nations potentially mistaking debris-caused incidents as the results of intentional aggressive acts by others.

In a paper published in Acta Astronautica, the team suggests that space debris in the form of spent rocket parts and other fragments of hardware hurtling at high speed pose a “special political danger” that could dangerously escalate tensions between nations. According to the study, destructive impacts caused by random space junk cannot easily be told apart from military attacks.

“The owner of the impacted and destroyed satellite can hardly quickly determine the real cause of the accident,” the authors write.

The risks of such an event occurring are compounded by the sheer volume of debris now orbiting Earth. Recent figures from Nasa indicate that there are more than 500,000 pieces of space junk currently being tracked in orbit, travelling at speeds up to 28,160 km/h. The majority of those objects are small — around the size of a marble — but some 20,000 of them are bigger than a softball. Nasa estimates that there are millions of undetectable pieces of debris in orbit that are too small to be monitored. But even small fragments such as these pose a threat — in fact, they’re considered a greater risk, as their invisible status means spacecraft and satellites can't do anything to avoid them until it’s too late. — Source: www. sciencealert.com