2023-10-17 10:54:08
Trail of a space rocket in the atmosphere captured from the ISS – NASA
MADRID, 17 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The space age is leaving traces in one of the most remote parts of the planet, the stratosphere, with potential implications for the climate, the ozone layer and the habitability of the Earth.
Using tools attached to the nose cone of their research aircraft and taking samples more than 19 kilometers above the planet’s surface, researchers have discovered significant quantities of metals in aerosols in the atmosphere, probably from increasingly frequent launches and returns of spaceships and satellites. That mass of metal is changing atmospheric chemistry in ways that can affect Earth’s atmosphere and ozone layer.
“We are finding this man-made material in what we consider a pristine area of the atmosphere,” he said. it’s a statement Dan Cziczo, professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University, and a member of the team of scientists that published a study on these results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ““And if something is changing in the stratosphere, this stable region of the atmosphere, it deserves a closer look.”
The team detected more than 20 elements in proportions reflecting those used in spacecraft alloys.
They found that the mass of lithium, aluminum, copper and lead from spacecraft re-entry far exceeded that of the metals found in natural cosmic dust. Almost 10% of large sulfuric acid particles (the particles that help protect and buffer the ozone layer) They contained aluminum and other metals from spacecraft.
Scientists estimate that up to 50,000 more satellites could reach orbit by 2030. The team estimates that means that, in the coming decades, up to half of stratospheric sulfuric acid particles would contain metals from reentry. It is not yet understood what effect this could have on the atmosphere, the ozone layer and life on Earth.
Scientists have long suspected that spacecraft and satellites were changing the upper atmosphere, but studying the stratosphere, where we don’t live and even the highest flights enter only briefly, is a challenge.
As part of NASA’s Airborne Science Program, part of the team flies a WB-57 aircraft to sample the atmosphere 19 km above the ground in Alaska, where circumpolar clouds tend to form. Cziczo and his group made similar measurements from an ER-2 aircraft over the continental United States. Both groups use instruments clipped to the nose cone of aircraft to ensure that only the freshest, undisturbed air is sampled.
Spacecraft launches and returns were once international events. The launches of Sputnik and the Mercury missions were front-page news. Now, a rising wave of innovation and increasingly flexible regulation means dozens of countries and corporations can put satellites and spacecraft into orbit. All of those satellites have to be sent up on rockets, and most of that material eventually comes back.
Like the wakes of large ships sailing across the ocean, rockets leave behind a trail of metals that They can change the atmosphere in ways scientists don’t yet understand.
“Just to get things into orbit, you need all this fuel and a huge body to support the payload,” Cziczo said. “There are so many rockets going up and back and so many satellites falling through the atmosphere that are starting to appear in the stratosphere as aerosol particles.
Of course, shooting stars were the first space transportation system. Meteorites fall through the atmosphere every day. The heat and friction of the atmosphere release material from them, just as they do with man-made artifacts. However, although hundreds of meteors enter the Earth’s atmosphere every day, increasingly rival the mass of metals that make up the tons of Falcon, Ariane and Soyuz rockets that propel spacecraft into space and return again to the surface of the Earth.
“Changes in the atmosphere can be difficult to study and complex to understand,” Cziczo said. “But what this research shows us is that the impact of human occupation and human spaceflight on the planet can be significant, perhaps more significant than we have imagined until now. Understanding our planet is one of the research priorities most urgent that exist”.
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