Gettin' awful crowded in my sky.
Looking at the big, vasty sky up on high you wouldn't really think that it was exactly running out of space, figuratively or metaphorically.
Unfortunately while that isn't true, it doesn't mean that collisions won't happen - and chance pretty much demands that something will, eventually, bump into something else.
Until now it's been simple pieces of manmade debris, ejected rocket pieces, dead satellites or even just waste products left behind by man that have bumped into each other and after all there are 17,000 of them floating around up there.
Last Tuesday however, an American communications satellite launched in 1997 crashed into a Russian satellite that had been launched in 1993. The Russian 'sat had been dead in the spacey water for quite some time, and the American one couldn't get out of the way in time - boom.
With the two satellites comes a large amount of new debris to litter our sky, adding to the already impressive amount of bits that NASA keep an eye on.
As with anything, sending more stuff up into the sky will only increase the odds of things bumping into each other - until we invent a force field that is.
Head over to TechNewsWorld to grab a more detailed rundown of the effects of this satellite knockout.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012