LONDON - Space experts are converging on a small town in Germany this weekend to discuss the traffic pile-up in orbit round the Earth. The conference, which opens at the European Space Agency's Darmstadt operations centre on Monday, is sponsored by space agencies worried about a direct hit at 20,000 m.p.h.
In the 40 years since Sputnik J, more than 3,750 launches have put 23,009 objects into space, of which more than 7,500 are still there. US scientists are tracking more than 8,500 objects bigger than a man's hand. Bits of hardware splintered to millimetre-size may have reached 17 million, each one orbiting at over five miles a second.
"A satellite, if it is hit by debris, will break into 1,000 bits each of those capable of going on to hit other satellites," says Dr Richard Crowther, of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency at Farnborough.