In “Gravity”, the film premieres next year Alfonso Cuarón, the ship in which an astronaut (George Clooney) makes his last trip suffers a terrible accident by hitting a piece of space junk. It’s science fiction, but something similar might happen. There is so much waste in orbit around the Earth is estimated that surrounds us a ‘belt’ consisting of more than 700,000 fragments, which are a clear risk to operational satellites or artifacts that humans take up there.
Today, the European Space Agency (ESA) draws up a plan to combat these dangerous wastes space, so that they can create new tools to remove the maximum amount of those already and there will be many more in the future.
Scientists know that the problem should not be cornered like a minor issue. As an example of the danger, only one fact: At a speed of 7.5 km per second, up to 2 cm screw just may be enough to destroy a satellite.