When you look up into the sky in the evenings, you may love watching the stars, the moon, the satellites up in the sky, and beautiful falling stars and meteors.  It’s a lot of fun to watch the sky at night, and today you will see many more satellites than there used to be in the sky.  The problem is that some of the streaks you see in the sky are not satellites, they are not falling stars, or even meteors.  Believe it or not, some of it is actually trash.  There have been things like satellite pieces, underwear, and tools found out in space, which means that space is being polluted by trash as well.

You see, often when astronauts are up there in the International Space Station, they don’t have a place where they can do laundry.  So their laundry is put into special cargo modules that are Russian, and then pushed towards our planet, where they usually burn up when they come into the atmosphere of the earth.  So, whenever you see something that looks like a meteor, you may be watching some dirty laundry go by.

Although this really isn’t one of the biggest environmental issues that we are dealing with today, space junk does remind you that we definitely are leaving our mark, not only on planet earth, but apparently in space as well.  There is a bit of a thread to this space junk as well.  About a year or so ago, the Navy in the United States had to fire off a missile to get rid of a spy satellite in the sky that had gone out of control.  This was done so that the fuel tank would not crash to the earth causing a bad health hazard to those on earth.

There are several hundred thousand objects out there in space orbiting around that have accumulated up there in the past 50 years.  There are more and more satellites being launched as well, especially since now companies put out mini satellites for reasonable prices.  Estimates back in 1999 by Space.com figured that there were more than four million pounds of junk in space in orbit near earth.  These objects often are traveling at thousands of miles per hour, which means even the smallest objects can be quite the threat to our astronauts and the satellites we have in the sky.

While we don’t have the same view of space we did 50 years ago, it definitely could be a lot worse than it is.  It is important that we do think about this problem though.  We don’t want the problem of space junk to get any worse than it already is.  The last thing we want is underwear and other items flying through the skies at night.  It’s time to make others aware of this problem and work to keep even outer space clear of our junk so we don’t end up causing a bigger problem in our world today.

Photo by: Stasys Eidiejus -
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