Space Debris Problem

Space Debris Problem

• Since the beginning of the space age in 1957, thousands of rockets, spacecraft, and instruments have been launched into space, resulting in a massive amount of space debris.
• The biggest contributor to the space debris problem is explosions in orbit, caused by leftover energy from fuel and batteries onboard spacecraft and rockets.

Efforts to Address the Problem

• The European Space Agency (ESA) is working to develop technologies to prevent debris creation and remove existing debris through its Space Safety Programme.
• The programme includes a net system to capture and trap debris, a harpoon to capture specific targets, and a drag sail to de-orbit satellites.
• A Vision-Based Navigation system is used to validate debris-tracking techniques in orbit with cameras and LIDAR.

Importance of Addressing the Problem

• If left unchecked, the space debris problem could lead to the "Kessler syndrome", where collisions between objects and debris create a cascade effect, making certain orbits around Earth inhospitable.
• The cost of inaction would be far greater than the cost of protecting satellites from space debris, which could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Quotes and Statements

• "Imagine how dangerous sailing the high seas would be if all the ships ever lost in history were still drifting on top of the water," says ESA Director General Jan Wörner.
• "We must think of the space environment as a shared and limited natural resource," says ESA Director General Jan Wörner.
• "We need to develop technologies to avoid creating new debris and removing the debris already up there," says Luisa Innocenti, heading ESA's Clean Space initiative.

Scientific English and Language Features

• The use of passive verbs and objective structures is common in scientific texts, particularly when describing processes and procedures.
• Non-finite verbs can be used to produce hedging and shift the certainty or authenticity to another clause.
• Modal verbs such as "must", "cannot", and "need" are used to express recommendations or obligations.
• Epistemic modality expresses possibility and prediction, and modal verbs such as "can" and "may" are used to emphasize possibility or likelihood.

New Prefixoids and Suffixoids

• New prefixoids and suffixoids are added, such as -cyber, relating to computer, information, technology, virtual reality, and cyberspace.

Non-Transparent Lexical Items

• Eponyms are a category of non-transparent lexical items based on proper names.
• Eponyms can be created through conversion, derivation, and noun groups.
• Examples of eponyms include ampère, watt, bentonite, Pythagorean theorem, Parkinson's disease, and Verner's law.

Abbreviations

• Abbreviations contribute to the ideal of economy and concision in specialized communication.
• Initialisms reflect the separate pronunciation of the initial alphabetic letters of the constituent words (e.g., HIV, human immunodeficiency virus).
• Acronyms are the sequence of initial letters of the constituent words pronounced as a single word (e.g., laser, light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation; REM, rapid eye movement; AIDS, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome).
• Clippings are reductions of longer forms, removing parts of the end of the word (e.g., ad or advert for advertisement), or the beginning (e.g., plane for airplane), or both (e.g., flu for influenza).
• Blends or blendwords combine parts of two words, usually the first part of one word with the second part of another (e.g., stagnation + inflation = stagflation; smoke + fog = smoke).

Compounding

• Compounding is the combination of lexemes into larger words.
• A compound is a unit consisting of two or more bases or stems.
• Compounds can be solid (e.g., bloodstream), hyphenated (e.g., flash-guard, half-life), or open (e.g., blood stream, fuel oil).
• Compounds can be nouns (e.g., heartbeat), adjectives (e.g., lead-free), or verbs (e.g., to brainwash, to fireproof).

Scientific and Technical Vocabulary

• Gotti lists 4 distinctive characteristics of scientific and technical vocabulary:
  • Lack of emotion (lack of connotation)
  • Transparency (technical words obtained by affixation, compounding, pre- or post-modification)
  • Conciseness (use of expressions that are as short as possible)
  • Recourse to acronyms, initialisms, blend words, noun strings, and clipping
• Psychologist suffixes: -ism, added to nouns or adjectives to obtain an abstract noun; -ation, added to a verb to obtain an abstract or collective noun.

Lexical Constituents Derived from Latin and Greek

• Recourse is frequently made to lexical constituents derived from Latin and Greek.
• Amongst prefixes:
  • h(a)emo- / h(a)emato- = having to do with blood
  • hypo- = below, lower than normal
  • hyper- = above, higher than normal
  • eu- = well, good
  • thermo- = heat
  • auto- = self, same
• Amongst suffixes:
  • -itis, inflammatory disease
  • -oma, tumour
  • -ase, enzyme
  • -ide, chloride
  • -ite, hypochlorite

Affixoids and Compounds

• Affixoids are hybrid elements, the denomination is usually extended also to morphemes that are not only prefixes or suffixes, but have a semantic content of their own.
• Words created by affixoids are similar to compounds.
• Examples of prefixoids:
  • psich-, concerning the psyche
  • pseudo-, false, pretend
  • self-, oneself, itself (reflexive meaning)
  • cyclo-, occurring in a circle
• Examples of suffixoids:
  • -phagia, eating
  • -logy, science, discipline
  • -pathy, disease
  • -form, having the form of
  • -graphy, process or styles of writing, drawing, or graphic representation

Conversion and Borrowing

• Conversion is a derivational process whereby an item is adapted or converted to a new word-class without the addition of an affix.
• Examples of conversion:
  • Noun to verb: catalogue (pamphlet), to catalogue
  • Verb to noun: to shut down (to close), shut down (the closing for a time of a factory)
  • Adjective to verb: soundproof (impenetrable to sound), to soundproof (to insulate so as to obstruct the passage of a sound)
• Borrowing: loanwords and calques
• Many of the terminological resources are derived from foreign sources, including originally the classical languages.
• There is a distinction between integrated borrowings and non-integrated borrowings.
• English has tended to be a donor of lexical material rather than a receiver.