Ayisha Ashruf and her colleagues at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre tracked seventeen pieces of 1960s-era space junk for 36 years and found that once the Sun’s sunspot count climbs past roughly two-thirds of a cycle’s peak, the upper atmosphere starts pulling debris down noticeably faster

Ayisha Ashruf, a scientist and engineer at the Space Physics Laboratory of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, led a team that followed seventeen pieces of long-dead space hardware across three full solar cycles, from 1986 to 2024. The objects, all in low Earth orbit between roughly 370 and 500 miles up, included old [...] The post Ayisha Ashruf and her colleagues at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre tracked seventeen pieces of 1960s-era space junk for 36 years and found that once