How do so many space artifacts end up orbiting Earth and endangering us, instead of falling into Earth or off somewhere else?
In:
They don’t have enough energy to go off somewhere else. The escape velocity for the Earth is about 11 km/second. Anything going less than that will stay in some sort of orbit, maybe circular, maybe very eliptical. The only way that won’t continue is if the orbit intersects
with the Earth or the orbit dips low enough to be slowed down by air resistance to make the orbit intersect, and then they crash land or burn up.
They don’t just “end up” in Earth orbit, we put them there. Space junk is stuff like old, dead satellites and spent upper stages of rockets. Almost all space junk in Earth orbit *does* eventually reenter the atmosphere and burn up. Space junk can’t go somewhere else because it has no propulsion. It’s in whatever orbit it’s in and it’s going to stay there until the orbit decays. Space junk isn’t a danger to us at large, it’s just that it can be dangerous to other spacecraft if we don’t manage it properly.
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