Defunct satellites and other pieces of orbital debris are pumping metals into Earth’s fragile upper atmosphere, with effects unknown
Humanity’s messy fingerprints, from disposable grocery bags adrift in the deepest oceanic trenches to microplastic-laced snowfall on the tallest mountaintops, litter Earth—and each contaminant poses potential environmental hazards that remain poorly understood. Now scientists have found another pollutant to worry about: vaporized metals from burned-up space junk that are floating around in Earth’s stratosphere, the same atmospheric region that holds our planet’s fragile, protective ozone layer.
In some respects, none of this is unexpected. Since the dawn of the Space Age, scientists have understood that the heat of atmospheric reentry vaporizes rocket stages, derelict satellites and other infalling spacecraft debris. Aerosolized metals from this human-sourced material add to those from the estimated 50 to 100 tons of space dust that falls into the atmosphere each day.
Earlier researchers “didn’t think a lot about what happens to things that vaporize during reentry. Of course they can’t disappear. They’ve got to go somewhere,” Murphy says. “And now with these measurements, we know where they go. They go into particles in the stratosphere.” But the NOAA flights weren’t deliberately seeking out vaporized metal from space junk. Rather they were targeted at studying sulfuric acid particles and other stratospheric aerosols. The complex photochemistry of these tiny particles has outsized, planetary-scale effects. Aerosols can tweak Earth’s temperature by modulating the formation of sunlight-reflecting clouds and influence our planet’s natural “sunscreen” by either spurring or suppressing ozone-destroying chemical reactions.
“With all these launches, the amount of material vaporizing during reentry could become roughly comparable to the amount of meteoritic material coming in. And it’s different stuff, a different mix of metals,” Murphy says. “When you have potentially 50,000 satellites in orbit, and they have a five-year lifetime, that’s 10,000 reentries a year—something like 30 a day. That is very different than the situation in the past, and that’s one of the things that is really changing.
Clarifying the nature and extent of space junk’s effects on the stratosphere, Schulz says, depends on many things—more thorough modeling and better observational coverage of spacecraft reentries chief among them. To help that happen, he argues, launch providers and spacecraft manufacturers should publicly disclose information otherwise treated as a trade secret, such as the specific structural recipes and simulated reentry profiles for satellites.
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