We’ve Come Out In a Debris Field

Man, that’s a lot of asteroids:

While there are asteroids all over the Solar System, there’s a huge collection of them between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Some astronomers think that could have formed into a planet if Jupiter was not nearby. By the way, this “belt” may erroneously create the impression that it is chock full of asteroids and requires some fancy Millennium Falcon-style maneuvering, but in reality there are usually hundreds or thousands of miles in between individual asteroids. This shows the Solar System is a big place.

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Looks like humans have a long way to go to catch up, with space debris and satellites, but at least we’ve made a start.

As of January 2019, the number of debris objects estimated to be in orbit are:
• 34 000 objects larger than 10 cm in diameter
• 900 000 objects ranging from from 1 cm to 10 cm in size
• 128 million objects from 1 mm to 1 cm

Source

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