Wondering if we may want to dust off our sextants in the coming months and years. A derelict Russian satellite and a functioning American satellite collided a few days ago, creating a debris field 500 miles above the earth. Apparently this is a popular orbit for the satellites that give sailors, airmen and drivers coordinates for our navigational devices. Once you have a collision like this, it's like a chain reaction, causing more collisions and more debris, so on and so forth. And it apparently takes a little time for gravity to clean up the mess (10,000 years, according to some sources). I'm wondering when space is going to be all but inaccessible to us...
Read it and weep:
Space crash debris to orbit Earth for 10,000 years - Yahoo! News
Read it and weep:
Space crash debris to orbit Earth for 10,000 years - Yahoo! News