The Kessler Effect

If you haven’t heard about The Kessler Syndrome, it’s a phenomenon in which the amount of junk in orbit around Earth reaches a point where it just creates more and more debris causing huge problems for satellites, astronauts and mission planners.

Here’s a conceivable scenario…The destruction of a dead satellite creates a swarm of debris in Earth orbit, which wreaks havoc as it zooms around our planet. The cloud then destroys a number of communications satellites, generating more and more debris with every violent collision. Next it takes out the Hubble Telescope, then the increasing debris field (each piece flying at approximately 17,000 mph), strikes the International Space Station destroying it and in turn the ISS is converted into millions of pieces of flying projectiles…

Science fiction? You’d be wrong. It’s a real possibility and the probability is growing every day.