Scientists invent method for predicting solar radio flux for two years ahead
Since the launch of Sputnik, the Earth’s first artificial satellite, in 1957, more than 41,500 tons of manmade objects have been placed in orbit around the sun, the Earth, and other planetary bodies. Since that time, the majority of objects, such as rocket bodies and large pieces of space debris, re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere in an uncontrolled way, posing a potential hazard to people and infrastructure. Predicting the re-entry date and time is a challenging task, as one needs to specify the density of the upper Earth atmosphere that strongly depends on solar activity which, in turn, is hard to predict. Earth atmosphere can become very heated due to solar activity which causes it to expand, and a satellite can decay in its orbit and fall back to the Earth due to the effect known as atmospheric drag. In addition, there is a lot of space debris, much of it very small; if a spacecraft unexpectedly changes its orbit and encounters even a small piece of debris, this would be equivalent to hitting a bomb because of the high speed.
phys.org
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