Abstract
During almost 50 years of space activities approximately 27,000 tons of man-made material re-entered into the Earth atmosphere at a mean rate of ∼600 tons per year. This compares with an estimated 40,000 tons of natural meteoroid material which reaches the Earth atmosphere each year. If this is so, why are meteoroids only dealt with at the end of this book? The answer lies in the size spectrum of meteoroids, which is dominated by particles with diameters of ∼200 µm and corresponding masses of ∼1.5 × 10−5 g. The resulting risk to operational spacecraft is generally low as compared with space debris, in spite of much higher impact velocities of up to 72 km/s (corresponding to a heliocentric escape orbit of 42 km/s intercepted by the Earth orbit at 30 km/s).
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© 2006 Praxis Publishing Ltd, Chichester, UK
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Klinkrad, H., Grün, E. (2006). Modeling of the Terrestrial Meteoroid Environment. In: Space Debris. Springer Praxis Books. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-37674-7_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-37674-7_10
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