Every year, hundreds of tons of human-made objects reenter the atmosphere and evaporate, leaving behind clouds of microscopic ash along with some fragments that happen to fall all the way to the ground.
Fascinating article. Some of the important parts:
Three or more large satellites or used rocket stages burn up in Earth’s atmosphere every day, according to the European Space Agency’s Space Environment Report published last year. Every year, hundreds of tons of human-made objects reenter the atmosphere and evaporate, leaving behind clouds of microscopic ash along with some fragments that happen to fall all the way to the ground.
An estimated 44 tonnes of space rock enters the atmosphere per day, most of which burns up. But space rocks and satellites are chemically very different things. While space rock consists mostly of silicon with small amounts of metals such as nickel and iron, space junk is predominantly made of aluminum and titanium.
“It’s still there in the atmosphere in the form of small particles of aluminum, and we don’t know what these particles actually do in the atmosphere.”
Note: there is more interesting stuff, the whole article worth a read.
They don’t seem to be putting a dent into global warming. So it’s just useless dust.
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Space Trash humanities legacy
