Thursday, April 25Royal Holloway's offical student publication, est. 1986

Tag: satellites

What’s Up in Space?
Science & Technology

What’s Up in Space?

If you’re asked the question “What is orbiting the Earth?”, the first answer to come to your mind might be “The Moon”. Another answer could be “The International Space Station” or a number of other television or GPS satellites. If you stop for a moment and think about it, you will realise that for people to be able to have global network coverage, there must be a very large number of satellites surrounding the Earth, careful moving around each other. But these aren’t the only things bouncing around in our exosphere. The current count of trackable “space junk”, the term for assorted space debris, is over 500,000, and this is creating a massive negative impact on the future of space travel. Space junk is mainly artificial, caused by leftover bits of rockets and space stations that have f...