US space officers are nervous about the threat of orbiting space junk-debris, rocket pieces, etc. As recently as 2006, space just above Earth contained 7,000 pieces of orbiting waste. Now, nearly 12,000 pieces are up there. As the chart shows, the rise stems from two events. In 2007, China fired an anti-satellite weapon into its inactive Fengyun-1 C satellite; the blast produced 3,037 debris objects. In 2009, Russia's dead Cosmos 2251 spacecraft slammed into the Iridium 33 satellite, releasing 1,750 objects. These two events raised the level of space junk by 60 percent. Worried about the danger posed to spacecraft, DOD and NASA are studying "active debris removal."
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