Climate change brings satellites down to Earth

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According to scientists in the UK, climate change on Earth could pose dangers to satellites in space.

Climate change is widely attributed to the build-up of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, in the Earth’s atmosphere. However, scientists from the

of

at the

have shown that the impact of carbon dioxide is being felt in space too.

Dr Hugh Lewis from the School will present a paper to the Fourth European Conference on Space Debris at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Germany this week indicating that increasing levels of CO2 are causing the amount of space debris orbiting the Earth to increase faster than previously thought.

Whilst CO2 is causing a global rise in temperature at the Earth’s surface, it has the opposite effect in the upper part of the atmosphere known as the thermosphere. Here, in a region of space that contains the International Space Station and many other satellites, the temperature and the atmospheric density are falling rapidly.

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