litening 3.pptVIP

* * Listening The first news: an ever increasing number of objects in low Earth orbit. The second news: marking the twentieth anniversary of the launching of the Hubble Space Telescope. JIM TEDDER: A camera, a glove, a hand tool, even a toothbrush...they are all up there, above the clouds, going around and around the Earth. There are also thousands of pieces of metal and plastic. Some of them are only about the size of a fingernail. Many are much larger. Scientists consider all these objects to be space junk, and they are a problem. Since people first launched rockets into space in the nineteen-fifties, we have been leaving behind all sorts of things. Some of them, like the camera, were lost by astronauts while they did work outside their spacecraft. But much of the space junk is made up of little pieces of things that were once bigger objects, until they struck each other and broke apart. KATHERINE COLE: Some things we send into space fall back toward Earth and burn up in the atmosphere. But larger pieces sometimes survive the extreme heat and hit the ground or the ocean at great speeds. So there is always concern that something may fall from the sky and do some harm. But space junk falling on housetops is not the biggest worry. Scientists are concerned about the Kessler syndrome(综合征 ). It is named for the American scientist who first thought of the idea in nineteen seventy-eight. Imagine what happens when an empty rocket strikes another while orbiting the earth. Two big things become many smaller things. They then hit other things. The pieces get smaller and smaller until they form a cloud of junk that blocks the path of future space vehicles. JIM TEDDER: So what can be done to clean up the space around our planet? Marco Castronuovo, an Italian Space Agency researcher, has an idea. In the publication Acta Astronautica, he writes about launching a satellite into space that would get very close to some of the larger pieces of space junk. The satellite would c