Fears about ‘Kessler Syndrome’ are growing as there are more than 130 million pieces of space junk orbiting Earth that could smash into satellites at any moment.
Named after American astrophysicist Donald Kessler — who first warned of its risks in 1978 — Kessler Syndrome is a chain reaction of space junk collisions.
This theoretical ‘domino effect’ would create a cascade of more dangerous space junk, as each collision generates more debris upon impact with more and more orbital platforms, increasing the likelihood of future impacts.
The end result would be a cloud of space junk surrounding the Earth, blocking ground-based telescopes and cutting off operations for all technology that relies on satellites, including weather forecasts, GPS and television.
Paul Lynam, an astronomer for the University of California’s Lick Observatory, said that the event will not be a ‘remote, out-there kind of thing,’ but ‘would affect everybody on the planet.’ And one new study suggests it could occur before 2050.
Right now, in low-Earth orbit (LEO), about 1,000 collision warnings are issued daily to alert telecoms, governments, scientists and others about the risks to their hardware.
Scientists have warned that metallic space debris could also disrupt Earth’s magnetosphere, exposing all life to deadly cosmic rays.
Ex-NASA physicist Sierra Solter-Hunt told DailyMail.com that metal particles from these shattered satellites, booster rockets and other space trash could ‘distort or trap the magnetic field’ that keeps Earth’s atmosphere from escaping.
Named after astrophysicist Donald Kessler – who first warned of its risks in 1978 – Kessler Syndrome basically describes a ‘space junk’ chain reaction, in which hardware smashing into each other in orbit creates runaway destruction. Above: a NASA map of known space junk
Ex-NASA physicist Sierra Solter-Hunt has warned that cheap satellite ‘megaconstellations’ like Elon Musk’s Starlink could disrupt Earth’s magnetosphere – exposing all life to deadly cosmic rays. She’s called for more studies on ‘the accumulation of metal dust from the space industry’
Although Solter-Hunt noted it is an ‘extreme case,’ such a layer of charged metal dust could lead to ‘atmospheric stripping’ akin to the ancient fates of Mars and Mercury.
But the results would be apocalyptic, turning Earth into the lifeless wastelands that its celestial neighbors are today.
‘All of the highly-conductive metal trash,’ as she told DailyMail.com, ‘is all settling in one region.’
This region includes the ionosphere and plasmasphere, which are already composed of highly charged ions of including oxygen, hydrogen and helium gases swirling in an electrically conductive plasma: a result of bombardment from the sun’s cosmic rays.
Solter-Hunt noted that electrical and magnetic interaction between these electrified gases and a fine cloud of metal trash, not unlike any other short circuit within complex and faulty wiring, could lead to a range of hard-to-predict and dangerous outcomes.
‘Because all this metal trash is building up within a plasma environment to begin with,’ she said, ‘there are several ways this dust and debris can cause charging effects.’
‘I think we need to stop using the ionosphere and atmosphere as a space industry trash bin immediately,’ Solter-Hunt advised. ‘It is wholly unstudied except for my paper and a few other papers that are starting to come out.’
After working on NASA’s comet-catching Stardust spacecraft research team in 2012, Solter-Hunt spent three years at the US Air Force Research Laboratory.
Solter-Hunt drew on estimates that Musk’s SpaceX is currently burning up over 2,755 lbs (1.3 tons) of internet satellite debris in Earth’s atmosphere every hour, creating a metal layer of ‘conductive particulate’ in orbit. Thousands of Starlink satellites are now above Earth
Large pieces of a SpaceX Crew-1 ship were also found in a field in Australia in 2022. This frayed piece of crash debris (pictured) shows its exposed carbon fiber and studded metal bolts
‘We are at about 10,000 satellites [in orbit] right now, but in 10 to 15 years there are likely going to be 100,000,’ Solter-Hunt noted.
‘By the time we get to 100,000 I think it could be too late,’ she said, ‘in terms of this unplanned geoengineering experiment that is going to occur.’
Only about 40,500 pieces of that debris are greater than four inches, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). The vast majority is between 0.4 to 0.04 inches long.
Seattle-based scientist Sierra Solter-Hunt (pictured) believes floating, metallic space junk will likely settle in the upper part of the ionosphere – some 50 to 400 miles above the Earth’s surface – weakening its magnetic field
But most of this ‘space junk’ is moving extremely fast, buzzing Earth at around 18,000 mph or nearly seven times faster than a speeding bullet, according to NASA.
While only 650 major collision accidents have been reported since 1957, ‘the number of objects in space that we have launched in the last four years has increased exponentially,’ according to planetary scientist Vishnu Reddy.
‘Unless we do something, we are in imminent danger of making a whole part of our Earth environment unusable,’ Dan Baker, the director of the University of Colorado’s Atmospheric and Space Physics lab, warned during a conference this December.
But according to Reddy, a professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, the risk of catastrophic space junk is worse at higher and more stable ‘geosynchronous orbits.’
Named because satellites at this altitude hover over one location back on Earth, orbiting in unison with the planet’s own spin, geosynchronous orbit (GEO) is home to billions of dollars worth of government and private communications satellites.
Critical systems including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) weather-tracking GOES satellites, Pentagon spy platforms, DirectTV and SiriusXM satellite radio all operate in GEO about 22,236 miles out in space.
And unlike craft orbiting in LEO, space-based platforms in GEO are unlikely to harmlessly burn up as they fall back to Earth anytime soon.
A two-pound cylinder from a NASA battery pallet (pictured) released by the International Space Station in 2021 crashed into a man’s home in Naples, Florida three years later – in April of this year. The episode is only one dramatic example of the risks posed by space junk
‘The most dangerous place where this [a ‘Kessler Syndrome’ event] could happen is in GEO,’ Reddy told CNN. ‘Because we have no way of cleaning it up in a quick way.’
Unwanted and dangerous trash in GEO can remain in orbit literally for millennia — increasing the risk of dangerous high-speed collisions in that orbit.
Some also fear that the onset of ‘Kessler Syndrome’ might be a slow-motion train wreck, one where the orbital billiard balls are already in motion, even if humanity somehow halted all of its space programs.
Kessler’s original 1978 thought experiment proposed a scenario where the current inertia of space junk collisions, perhaps too tiny to be tracked from Earth today, are slowly building momentum — adding more and more projectile debris into the system.
‘If the Kessler syndrome starts to happen and we start to see a sort of cascade of collisions, we’re going to see it in the smallest grains first,’ space plasma physicist David Malaspina told this December’s AGU meeting in DC.
There are more than an estimated 130 million pieces of so-called ‘space junk,’ in orbit according to the European Space Agency, but only tens of thousands are tracked (pictured)
‘These are our canary in the coal mine,’ Malaspina, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, advised.
UC-Boulder physicist Dan Baker compared what has happened to the economic condition known as ‘the tragedy of the commons.’
‘Stated simply, the tragedy of the commons is that individuals acting rationally and individually according to their own self interest will deplete a shared resource, even if this is contrary to the best interests of the group,’ Baker said.
‘And I believe that we are watching the tragedy of the commons play out in low Earth orbit right before our eyes,’ he told the AGU, according to Space.com.
