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space debris
each time a rocket is launched, more garbage joins the debris in Earth orbit and the risk of future craft suffering collisions increases. Orbital debris includes discarded satellites and fragments of satellites that have disintegrated. Debris in near-Earth orbit falls back into the atmosphere. Smaller pieces burn up, but larger pieces can fall back to Earth, as parts of the Skylab space station did in 1979. Farther from the Earth, debris stays in orbit for many years – it is thought that satellites in geostationary orbit could remain
there for up to a million years. About 7,000
orbiting objects are tracked by radar and fewer
than 400 of these are working satellites. Many pieces of debris are too small to be tracked but
still large enough to be dangerous.
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