Space debris has become a real and concerning problem recently and according to the data shared by the European Space Agency (ESA), the orbit of the Earth holds approximately 36,500 pieces of junk that is bigger than a baseball ball, in other words, wider than 10cm.
According to the agency, this means that there are hundreds of millions of smaller scraps floating in space uncontrollably, and the real problem is that these objects, including the smaller ones, can cause serious damage to a satellite or a spacecraft.
This is why, the co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak, wants to launch a satellite network to analyze and study the vast amount of junk in space.
With his company Privateer, Wozniak intends to collect a series of data through the information obtained by crowdsourcing and observations made by its fleet of satellites.
Moriba Jah, the Chief Scientific Advisor of Privateer, also provided more insight to Space.com regarding the issue. "I think we're looking at several hundred satellites. We won't launch all several hundred at once, we'll just slowly build it up," he said.
The company plans to launch its first satellite in February 2022 and it intends to analyze the data acquired in space and carry out some kind of a characterization of the waste objects, to be able to determine their shape, size, and rotating speed among other features.
Jah also elaborated about this and said "The catalogs of objects out there all treat things like they're spheres,"
"We're going to take it beyond the sphere, to what the thing more realistically looks like and is," he added.
These pieces of information will eventually help satellite operators and other spatial community members to assess better the threat that space debris pose and thus improve their predictions regarding how long these pieces of scrap will remain in the atmosphere.
