US Military Satellite Explodes Over Earth, ESA Assesses Risk

And while they are too small to penetrate our atmosphere, small debris could still cause significant damage to spacecraft and orbiters while hurtling around the Earth at tens-of-thousands of mph. That's where the ESA has stepped in, hastily assessing the trajectory and threat of each piece. What they found was encouraging.

"The event is not considered major," Holger Krag of ESA's Space Debris Office said in a release. "Should the reported number of fragments stabilize at this level, we can consider it to be within the range of the past 250 on-orbit fragmentation events."

"We do not expect any meaningful risk due to the event," he added.

Still, the agency presses that this is a strong reminder of the risk that aging satellites pose. Later this month, experts will meet at ESA's ESTEC technical centre at Noordwijk, the Netherlands, to discuss debris mitigation technologies - methods to ensure that satellites can remove themselves from key low-Earth orbits well in advance of a repeat problem like this.

As things stand, the ESA often resorts to harpooning space debris that can get in the way of a mission, while NASA and various independent research partners have been investigating ultra-fast robotics to catch hurtling space junk.

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