Untitled chapter
Orbits - Book 1 - The Hunt For Everything by Thomas Swartz
Copyright © 2022 - Thomas Swartz
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact: [email protected]
The cover illustration and end page animation from NASA depicts the distribution and movement of man-made objects orbiting Earth.
From NASA:
More than 27,000 pieces of orbital debris, or “space junk,” are tracked by the Department of Defense’s global Space Surveillance Network (SSN) sensors. Much more debris -- too small to be tracked, but large enough to threaten human spaceflight and robotic missions -- exists in the near-Earth space environment. Since both the debris and spacecraft are traveling at extremely high speeds (approximately 15,700 mph in low Earth orbit), an impact of even a tiny piece of orbital debris with a spacecraft could create big problems.
