There are over a half million pieces of human-made material in orbit around our planet. Some are the size of school buses, some the size of BB gun pellets. They all had a function at some point, but now most are simply space debris littered from 100 to 22,000 miles above the Earth. Yet, all behave perfectly according to the laws of physics. Many in the space community have called the collision hazard caused by space debris a crisis. Popular culture has embraced the risks of collisions in space in films like Gravity. Some participants have dramatized the issue by producing graphics of Earth and its satellites, which make our planet look like a fuzzy marble, almost obscured by a dense cloud of white pellets meant to conceptualize space congestion.
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