Speaker
Description
Over the last twenty years, space activities have expanded rapidly, marked by a threefold increase in launch rates and a thirtyfold increase in the number of satellites deployed (Taupin et al., 2025). In 2025, the mass of anthropogenic material re-entering the atmosphere was estimated to represent between 10% and 32% of the natural cosmic influx, with aluminum contributions alone exceeding cosmic source influx (Carrillo-Sánchez et al., 2020; Ferreira et al., 2025). This increase is largely driven by objects orbiting below 600 km altitude, where orbital lifetimes rarely exceed a decade.
When these objects ablate during atmospheric reentry, most of them inject gases and solid aerosols that are deposited primarily in the mesosphere and stratosphere. If they accumulate in large quantities, these aerosols can influence atmospheric composition, ozone chemistry, and radiative processes across various spatial and temporal scales (Ferreira et al., 2024; Ross et al., 2014). It is therefore essential to accurately determine past and current injection rates to assess their environmental impacts.
In this study, we present an alternative framework for estimating the mass released through ablation during atmospheric re-entry of spacecrafts. Previous approaches have either relied on theoretical average ablation coefficient (Schulz et al., 2021) or targeted individual chemical species (Ferreira et al., 2025). Here, we generate a range of ablation scenarios using the DEBRISK software developed by CNES, applied to simplified representations of real satellite models, lower and upper stages with varying masses, cross-section and orbital characteristics. These simulations are coupled with object-level information from DISCOSweb to reconstruct the cumulative mass injected into the stratosphere over the 1981–2020 period.
Furthermore, we created a new dataset describing specific launcher properties and propellant usage in order to quantify emissions from rocket launches, including black carbon and alumina particles. Altitude dependent injection profiles are calculated using representative flight trajectories and propellant burn rates for solid and liquid-fueled launch vehicles.
Finally, the resulting estimates are briefly compared with trends derived from the NASA Cosmic Dust Catalogs to evaluate the consistency between modeled inputs and in-situ observations of solid aerosol populations in the stratosphere.
References:
Carrillo-Sánchez, J. D., Gómez-Martín, J. C., Bones, D. L., Nesvorný, D., Pokorný, P., Benna, M., ... Plane, J. M. (2020). Cosmic dust fluxes in the atmospheres of Earth, Mars, and Venus. Icarus, 335, 113395.
Ferreira, J. P., Huang, Z., Nomura, K. I., Wang, J. (2024). Potential ozone depletion from satellite demise during atmospheric reentry in the era of mega-constellations. Geophysical Research Letters, 51(11), e2024GL109280.
Ferreira, J. P., Wang, J. (2025). Determining mass fluxes of space debris upon demise in the atmosphere. Acta Astronautica.
Ross, M. N., Sheaffer, P. M. (2014). Radiative forcing caused by rocket engine emissions. Earth’s Future, 2(4), 177-196.
Schulz, L., Glassmeier, K. H. (2021). On the anthropogenic and natural injection of matter into Earth’s atmosphere. Advances in Space Research, 67(3), 1002-1025.
Taupin, Q., Lasue, J., Määttänen, A., Zolensky, M. (2025). Constraining the origins of terrestrial stratospheric solid aerosols over the 1981-2020 period (No. EPSC-DPS2025-1899).