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Falling metal space junk is changing Earth's upper atmosphere in ways we don't fully understand
(www.livescience.com)
Once again, Elon Musk ruins everything.
this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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how much metal does the earth get anyway?
i know were constantly hit by metal objects which often burn up in the atmosphere. just trying to get some perspective...
About 100 tonnes of micrometeoroids burn up in the atmosphere every day.
thank you!
I'm pretty sure that the important bit here was the quality of those particles, not their quantity.
The study was designed to detect aerosols covered with "meteor dust" left behind by space rocks that burned up upon entry. Instead, the plane detected high levels of metallic elements contaminating the floating molecules, none of which could be explained by meteors or other natural processes.
The discovery "represents the first time that stratospheric pollution has been unquestionably linked to reentry of space debris," researchers wrote in the statement.
In total, the study identified 20 different metallic elements that do not naturally occur in Earth's atmosphere, including silver, iron, lead, magnesium, titanium, beryllium, chromium, nickel and zinc.
The team suspects that the main source of the pollution is rocket boosters that are ejected by rockets shortly after they clear the upper atmosphere, then fall back to Earth.
While this is certainly an interesting thing to know, there was no quantitative data provided about the discoveries. While a bunch of rare earth metals wandering around the atmosphere is certainly not a common occurrence, knowing whether we're talking about parts per billion or parts or parts per undecillion is a substantial difference (if Google didn't just lie to me, there are around one quattuordecillion molecules in our atmosphere, probably give or take a couple orders of magnitude).
Cannot wait till we discover the reason, then we will have space debris recovering missions for centuries.