Space junk seems to be accumulating around the Earth from frequent satellites launches. Space junk or space debris are the words used to describe natural space debris scientists find in the solar system. Scientists called meteoroids, comets, and asteroid space debris before the 1979 NASA Orbital Debris Program came on the scene.
That NASA program redefined space junk to include the mass of artificially created objects that humans send into space. Those objects include parts of rocket stages, old satellites, and metal fragments left over from space collisions as well as the natural disintegration process. Five space satellite collisions over the past six years generated a plethora of space junk and that junk continues to orbit around the Earth.
The amount of space junk floating around the Earth makes it difficult to launch new satellites so they avoid near-Earth asteroids and these other space objects. It’s not uncommon for a telecom satellite to get hit numerous times by a broken-up space junk. According to University of Arizona Professor Vishnu Reddy, his team constantly looks for fast-moving space junk as well as the slow-moving near-Earth objects. Reddy uses the same technique to identify all types of space junk.
But there’s an empty trash-bag-looking piece of space junk flying around the Earth and it acts like it’s on steroids. According to NASA, this piece of junk is erratically moving back and forth in an unpredictable fashion between 334,000 and 372,000 miles away from the Earth’s surface. Scientists call this weird-acting space junk A10bMLz. A10bMLz looks like a wind-blown empty trash bag in space, but there’s no wind in space.
According to Daniel Bamberger, an astronomer from Northolt Branch Observatories in London, A10bMLz may be natural, not artificial space junk. Bamberger said his team just found A10bMLz on January 25th using the ATLAS asteroid survey in Hawaii. As the Bamberger team tracked the movements of A10bMLz, they discovered this unusual acting piece of space junk defies previous predictions. A10bMLz moves in a random fashion and scientists don’t know why it acts that way.
But according to the University of Texas, orbital mechanics researcher, Moriba Jah, A10bMLz is part of a phenomenon called High Area-to-Mass Ratio. Jah claims this particular space object reacts to solar radiation. Moriba Jah said space objects that possess a big surface area and have a low mass, are prime targets for solar radiation. Jah thinks the A10bMLz space junk will continue to orbit the Earth for the next few weeks.
