Seven astronauts boarded the shuttle today, led by Cdr. Scott Altman at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center this afternoon. Despite one warning signal right after liftoff, they safely reached orbit within eight minutes and are cruising space at more than 17,200 miles per hour.

The desination is the Hubble Space Telescope, whose batteries, cameras and gyroscopes are in need of replacement, located 350 miles out in orbit where the team will begin five days of space walks to repair the telescope.

NASA has openly discussed the threat of micro-meteorites hitting the orbiter while the astronauts are fixing Hubble. Earlier this year two satellites collided over Siberia, which has increased the risk even more, as space junk from that collision drifts lower. Once Atlantis fixes Hubble, it will immediately move to a lower altitude to reduce chances of getting hit by space junk.

Not content with simply overflowing the lands and oceans of an overpopulated planet Earth with garbage, toxic waste, and burnt-up fossil fuels, humans are now causing a big scary mess outside of Earth’s orbit.

Orbital debris, also known as space junk, is in orbit around Earth. Everything from entire spent rocket stages and satellites that no longer operate to random metal fragments, paint flakes, dust, and slag from solid rocket motors. It’s a veritable junkyard up there, and as spacefaring nations continue to make their way off the planet and into the cosmos, there was bound to be an accident or collision with the growing garbage casing we’re building around the globe.

On 11 February 2009, the deactivated Kosmos-2251 spacecraft collided with the operational Iridium 33 satellite, resulting in the total metal carnage of both craft. The collision created a huge amount of debris in it’s wake, an estimated tens of thousands of pieces of orbital junk that will orbit the Earth and be a huge threat to other satellites for the next 10,000 years

The chief of Russia’s Mission Control, Vladimir Solovyov, says the crash occurred in an orbit crowded by satellites from many nations. He said that the fragments left by the collision could pose a very serious threat to craft made of lighter alloys. Experts have suggested that collision likely created thousands of fragments.