SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – How many satellites is too many satellites? This technology, sent up into Earth’s orbit, provides everything from long distance images to television, audio, data and voice services.
For more, stream KCBS Radio now.
With more satellites our coverage gets more seamless. Yet, with each one we send up into the sky, space gets a little more crowded.
“There’s now over 11,000 working satellites when just 10 years ago there was just 1,000,” Jonathan McDowell, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told KCBS Radio’s Holly Quan in a recent interview with KCBS.
He explained that things we put into the orbit around Earth – a few hundred miles up – does eventually come down naturally. However, that takes a period of years and McDowell said we are currently putting this in orbit faster than they are coming down.
“It’s having an effect,” he said. “We think that the outer atmosphere is getting just a little bit thinner and so there’s not as much headwind for the satellites to plow through, and so they stay up for longer.”
While he said there is a general consensus that things are getting too crowded up there, McDowell said that people are making money off many of the satellites. Therefore, there isn’t a big push to declutter the orbit.
There has already been a sizeable collision – the collision of Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 in 2005. According to materials provided by NASA, it created more than 1,800 pieces of debris approximately 10 centimeters and larger were produced during the crash.
“Most of those pieces of space debris are still orbiting the Earth today and are a hazard to traffic,” McDowell said. “So, we’ve been tighter since then. We've managed to avoid other collisions, but there have been minor fender benders in recent years that are starting to increase in number, and so it’s getting me a bit worried.”
He said that regulation and caps should be put in place within the next decade to reduce the risk.
DOWNLOAD the Audacy App
SIGN UP and follow KCBS Radio
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram