Orbital debris, the ISS, moon and sun

Here’s an animation showing the accumulation of debris in near earth orbit due to human activity since 1957. It does look very cluttered but remember the articles aren’t to scale.

YouTube – Space debris over time.

And where is all the junk coming from (click on image to get more detail – thanks to Michæl Paukner’s photostream):

Meanwhile there has been some stunning photos taken of the International Space Station (ISS) from earth. The Bad Astronomer recently featured this one of the ISS against the dark side of the moon (Space Station crosses the dark side of Moon!).

And here’s another another one against the sun from the Astronomy.com blog (Oh my gosh, the Sun!)

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One response to “Orbital debris, the ISS, moon and sun

  1. Katie Goates

    I want to know more about Maritius’s single satellite!

    Like

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