Yes, even space junk is impacted by climate change. When solar photons hit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the molecules release energy as infrared heat. The troposphere, the atmospheric layer closest to the ground, is sufficiently dense to trap that heat, causing global warming. But higher up, the atmosphere is so thin that radiation escapes, cooling and thinning the mesosphere, our atmosphere’s middle layer. Excessive greenhouse gases can accelerate this process, causing successive atmospheric layers to pancake downward, reducing drag at any given altitude. This means satellites that were expected to come down in a couple of years could stay up much longer, quintupling the lifetime of some space debris by the end of this century.
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