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Waste in space: all the news surrounding space junk

The latest news about space junk and global cleanup efforts.

A pressure vessel from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stage fell on a man’s farm in Washington State last week, leaving a “4-inch dent in the soil,” the local sheriff’s office said Friday. Called the “Conjunction Streaming Service Demo,” the graph tool illustrates in real time the sheer number of space objects — out of an assortment of 1,500 items in low Earth orbit — that get uncomfortably close to one another in a period of 20 minutes. More than four months after India destroyed one of its own satellites in space, dozens of pieces of debris from the cataclysmic event still circulate in orbit, posing a small but potential threat to other functioning spacecraft that might pass close by.

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