Question

Which country has the highest number of space debris till date?
A. France
B. Russia
C. Japan
D. China

Answer 1

Hint: Space debris is basically space waste or trash which is either human made or naturally existing in space due to various meteorites etc. They are functionally useless to humans and instead can pose a risk to spacecraft and other machinery which is sent into space by humans.

Complete step-by-step solution:
Let us discuss the types of space debris first. Broadly speaking space debris comes in two types; natural space debris and artificial space debris.
Natural space debris consists of particles and pieces of comets, asteroidal materials like meteoroids et cetera.
Artificial space debris is the one which is made by humans as the name suggests, and it usually keeps on orbiting the earth unlike natural debris which are mostly seen when they travel through the Earth’s atmosphere.
Typically space debris is termed as a negative externality because it poses risks and external costs on others , a cost which is not typically taken into account nor fully accounted for or not easily able to be accounted for. Most of these pieces of debris are dust from solid rocket motors, surface erosion debris like paint flakes, and frozen coolant from nuclear powered satellites.
The first piece of artificial space debris was created around the start of the space age, in October \[{{4}^{th}},1957\] when the last stage of the rocket that launched Sputnik-1 remained in orbit.
Although earlier scientists thought that space debris like meteoroids have a high collision risk, it was later proved false and that the collision probability from meteoroids is very low, although not negligible. This is why whenever there is a\[\dfrac{1}{10,000}\]collision chance with known debris, ISS (although has Whipple shielding to resist damage from collision) avoids it by maneuvering the station.
Although no country has been actively trying to map out the space debris their country leaves in the space atmosphere, it has been calculated that Russia is the country which has a significant jump over other countries regarding space debris, the numbers being around \[15,117\]as compared to the United States’\[6,144\]which comes second.
So to answer the question, it is Russia who has the highest number of space debris till date.

Note:It is believed that any fragment of space debris larger than \[1cm\](centimeter) can be able to penetrate the walls of existing satellites/spacecrafts. To prevent that, we have space tracking in effect, computer programs which search for possible collisions between large space debris objects and try to maneuver spacecrafts out of harm’s way.