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Climate change is wreaking havoc on Earth – but soon it will even be messing up its orbit, scientists have revealed.
It is poised to exacerbate the growing problem of space debris, potentially shrinking the usable space for satellite in low Earth orbit, according to a new MIT study.
Researchers have calculated that the ongoing warming trend, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, could diminish available orbital space by anywhere from one-third to 82 per cent by the end of the century, depending on the extent of future carbon emissions.
The culprit? A weakened natural cleaning mechanism in the upper atmosphere. The same greenhouse effect warming the lower atmosphere also cools the upper layers where satellites operate.
This cooling reduces atmospheric density, lessening the drag that normally pulls space debris down towards Earth, where it burns up upon re-entry.
Consequently, a less dense upper atmosphere translates to less efficient removal of space junk. As debris accumulates, the risk of collisions increases, threatening the functionality of vital satellites.
This escalating congestion in low Earth orbit poses significant challenges for future space endeavours, according to the study, published in Nature Sustainability.
“We rely on the atmosphere to clean up our debris. There’s no other way to remove debris,” study lead author Will Parker, an astrodynamics researcher at MIT, said.
“It’s trash. It’s garbage. And there are millions of pieces of it.”
Circling Earth are millions of pieces of debris about one-ninth of an inch (3 millimetres) and larger — the width of two stacked pennies — and those collide with the energy of a bullet.
There are tens of thousands of plum-sized pieces of space junk that hit with the power of a crashing bus, according to The Aerospace Corporation, which monitors orbital debris. That junk includes results of old space crashes and parts of rockets with most of it too small to be tracked.
There are 11,905 satellites circling Earth — 7,356 in low orbit — according to the tracking website Orbiting Now. Satellites are critical for communications, navigation, weather forecasting and monitoring environmental and national security issues.
“There used to be this this mantra that space is big. And so we can we can sort of not necessarily be good stewards of the environment because the environment is basically unlimited,” Parker said.
But a 2009 crash of two satellites created thousands of pieces of space junk. And Nasa measurements are showing the reduction of drag, so scientists now realise that that “the climate change component is really important,” Parker said.
The density at 250 miles (400 kilometres) above Earth is decreasing by about 2 per cent a decade and is likely to get intensify as society pumps more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, said Ingrid Cnossen, a space weather scientist at the British Antarctic Survey who was not part of the research.
Cnossen said in an email that the new study makes “perfect sense” and is why scientists have to be aware of climate change’s orbital effects “so that appropriate measures can be taken to ensure its long-term sustainability”.