I believe that as long as you keep a piece of jettisoned cargo targeted, it will remain in space. If someone gave me an artifact or I managed to stumble across one, I'd do it in a heartbeat, especially since I work from home. 9 hours of uninterupted signal sequence being broadcast to the world to decode.
Edit: Hell... I have some experiments I want to try on it myself. Most of them using in-game mechanics.