I think the idea is that whenever there are collisions or small meteor impacts that ejects a bunch of small debris into random orbits. After enough time, there's just too much for safe transit.
25 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr OP 13 Mar
has anyone had any success cleaning up debris?
i’m thinking something like the ocean cleanup nets that are picking up plastics
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Not yet, but it's also not a big problem yet. I know there are ideas to launch chunks of magnetic materials into orbit that will sort of vacuum up a bunch of metallic debris over time.
There's not much you can do about non-magnetic debris though.
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