Profs & Pints DC: Dealing with Space Debris

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Dealing with Space Debris,” on efforts to monitor and clean up the junk we’ve left orbiting Earth, with Mark Skinner, former Penn State University astrophysicist and current senior project manager for space traffic management for the Aerospace Corporation.

Over the course of the Space Age we’ve launched thousands of objects into space for scientific research, exploration, and national security reasons. Many have remained in space past their functional lifetime, causing earth to be orbited by millions of defunct dead satellites, rocket bodies, and various remnants of such equipment—what we refer to as “space debris” or “space junk.” It poses a hazard to space missions and, in reentering our atmosphere, us here on Earth.

Blast off to the world of those focused on monitoring and mitigating the risks from space debris with Mark Skinner, an internationally recognized expert on the subject whose decades of research and…