An expert talks about "sky trash," how weather balloons are considered sky trash and how long other objects can stay in the sky.
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00:00Sky trash is really everything that is in our atmosphere, so not in space, in our atmosphere that is to some degree controlled.
00:10Astrophysicist Dr. Brad Tucker says sky trash can be anything.
00:14You know, those little party balloons that you sometimes release, plastic bags that get caught up, things that break off of other things.
00:20If it doesn't quite reach the right height, it could get stuck up there.
00:24Weather balloons can be considered sky trash with a purpose.
00:27And with 2,000 weather balloons launched every day, they're a noticeable and regular presence in our atmosphere.
00:33There's so many that if you go to like flight radar, they have a balloon icon.
00:38Weather balloons are large and easily identifiable, but smaller objects can make things interesting for those who work in the sky.
00:45A plastic bag is probably one of the wildest ones.
00:47If you're in a jet plane flying by at hundreds of miles an hour, you're not going to, you're just going to see this blur out of the corner of your eye.
00:54And you can imagine like it moves weird and doesn't look right on radar.
00:59But it's not just up in the air. Sky trash gathers a lot of attention from folks down on the ground as well.
01:05In the latest investigations of what we call UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, the new term for UFOs,
01:12When Congress and the Pentagon have been identifying some of these weird sightings on radar that pilots saw, one was most definitely a plastic bag.
01:21What comes up must come down. And when it comes to space trash, it will come down eventually.
01:28At the end of the day, nearly all of it does come down. It doesn't stay up there.
01:32But how long it stays up there can just be all random numbers for hours to months.
01:38For AccuWeather, I'm meteorologist Tony Loback.
01:42NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology