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Space waste, space junk or orbital debris, has become a serious issue.
It includes spent rocket stages, dust from solid rocket motors, unused satellites and other man made fragments. All such waste poses a collision threat with operational spacecraft or even crashing back to Earth.
Space junk fragments were not originally perceived as a problem, scientists wrongly predicted that the debris would just burn itself up as it returned through the earth’s atmosphere.
Now ground based lasers, ” laser brooms “, are to be deployed to target this space junk, breaking it into very small pieces or even sweeping it out of the path of functional orbital traffic.
WORDS
junk: old things considered as of no value anymore, waste.
orbit (adj. orbital): the curved path, usually elliptical, made by planets, sattelites, spacecrafts around larger objects such as Earth, the sun, etc…
debris: the remains of something which was destroyed or broken down.
to burn up: to be completely destroyed by heat (e.g. objects entering the earth’s atmosphere).
