The threat from climate change is starting to be felt in space

LONDON – Great threat global warming the effects of climate change are imminent. According to a study, climate change caused by carbon dioxide inhibits the Earth’s ability to clean its upper atmosphere on its own, so that objects close to orbit, including satellites, suffer less disturbance.

For satellite maintenance companies this climate change will surely be soft food, but the Earth’s inability to clean itself due to excess CO2 will add a lot of polluting and dangerous space debris.

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“Space debris is becoming a rapidly growing problem for satellite operators due to the risk of collisions. Long-term declines above atmospheric solids are getting worse,” said Ingrid Cnossen, researcher with the British Antarctic Survey.

The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, used research models of the entire atmosphere to examine how the upper part of a region that stretches between 56 and 310 miles of the earth’s surface has changed.

“The changes we have seen between the climate in the upper atmosphere over the past 50 years and our predictions for the next 50 years are the result of carbon dioxide emissions,” continued Cnossen. He also claimed that greenhouse gases actually have the opposite effect on the atmosphere.

When those CO2 particles absorb the limited heat available there, the atmosphere shrinks and cools, in an effect that ultimately makes the satellite’s orbit smoother and longer, in addition to the debris caused by old dead spacecraft.

Everyone will eventually lose if the space debris loses control. The new satellites will have difficulty working in what could be a landfill near orbit, and humans, on earth and in space, could face life-threatening consequences.
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Previously, the International Space Station (ISS) carried out maneuvers to avoid the threat of debris from the test launch of the Russian anti-satellite missile.

Uniquely, the maneuver was carried out with the help of the Russian cargo ship, Progress 81, which was installed on the International Space Station.

The Russian spacecraft burned its engine for five minutes Monday night (October 24, 2022) to save the ISS from damage. This maneuver was to avoid fragments of the satellite which were destroyed in a Russian anti-satellite test in November 2021.

(wb)