By Catherine Appleby, Writer
Are we harming space with the pollution we send up there? Debris from our spacecrafts needs to go somewhere and that could be anywhere throughout space.
Most of us would never think of what happens to the leftover pieces of spacecrafts that get left behind after they detach, but in reality we probably should. Our pollution in space could be causing more harm than we may originally think.
Multiple times a year, the international space station has to avoid devastating collisions with space pollution. The international space station is commonly hit by small debris that can even cause cracks in the windows or chip parts of the paint but a much larger collision could cause pieces of the station to be spread throughout the atmosphere, possibly even crashing into the Earth. The station has had near misses with debris from old spacecrafts showing just how long debris may stay in the orbit of our planet.
Debris isn’t the only pollution coming from our spacecrafts; the fuel of rockets can also have a harmful effect on our atmosphere, especially in the middle and upper atmosphere. Rocket emissions have been included in reasons for our depleting atmosphere and have not been seriously considered for possible climate change effects. Rocket soot has been known to accumulate in the stratosphere which can trap sunlight and heat up this part of the atmosphere. This can have immense effects on the stratosphere, even affecting chemical reactions that happen, adding to ozone loss. Not much work has been done into the true effects of rocket emissions on our atmosphere and therefore the effects could be much worse than we initially thought.
The effects of space pollution often get forgotten about when talking about climate change and the effects on the atmosphere. Yet it can leave a large impact on our planet just as the use of fossil fuels can, especially when spacecrafts leave emissions directly in the stratosphere.
Space pollution is a very real threat and it isn’t just to our planet.
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