Like most people reading this blog, I generally just take satellite-based technologies as a given. But what if it were impossible to orbit satellites around the Earth? Welcome to the the frightening world of the Kessler Syndrome.
Because the nations and companies of the world haven’t done a very good job of taking care of their messes, there is a lot of debris floating in orbit around us. As the amount of debris increases from dead satellites and collisions between objects in orbit, there is in turn more debris created that in turn has the potential to create yet more collisions.
Kessler Syndrome posits scenario where the amount of debris in orbit around the planet is so dense that it sets off a series of cascading collisions–which in turn generate even more debris and more collisions–that would effectively make it impossible to place satellites in orbit for decades.
Ironically one of the biggest threats for triggering a worst case scenario is the European Space Agency’s Envistat which was launched in 2002 and designed to improve available data relevant to a number of environmental problems. In 2012, the ESA lost contact with Envistat and it will spend the next 150 years in an orbit that will frequently bring it near potential collisions with other satellites and debris.
Referring to a 2009 incident in which Envistat had to be maneuvered to avoid a collision with the upper stage of a Chinese rocket, astrophysicist and Kessler Syndrome namesake Donald Kessler last year told Space Safety Magazine,
The cascade process can be more accurately thought of as continuous and as already started, where each collision or explosion in orbit slowly results in an increase in the frequency of future collisions. But since Envisat is so massive, if the collision had occurred it would instantly produced a debris environment that, under the most optimistic conditions, we would not expect to have for at least 100 years. That is close to what most might call a “trigger” event.”