Скачать или смотреть Why the ISS Doesn’t Burn Up in Space?

The International Space Station (ISS), weighing as much as 77 elephants, orbits Earth at an incredible speed of 8 km/s—fast enough to travel from Atlanta to London in just 14 minutes. While meteoroids burn up as they pass through Earth's atmosphere, the ISS remains intact, circling the planet for decades. Why doesn’t it face the same fiery fate?To understand this, let’s first explore why meteoroids ignite. These space rocks travel at speeds of 12–40 km/s, enough to traverse the U.S. in five minutes. When a meteoroid enters Earth's atmosphere, it interacts with air particles, predominantly nitrogen and oxygen.Even at high altitudes where the air is thinner, meteoroids collide with these particles at incredible speeds, compressing them and generating immense pressure and heat. This process causes the meteoroid’s surface to crack and disintegrate, creating the fiery streaks we see in the sky. Most meteoroids burn up in the mesosphere, located 48–80 km above Earth.