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Feb 11, 2009 06:15 PM | 19
A commercial satellite collided with a Russian satellite over Siberia yesterday, yielding a cloud of fragments, according to a NASA scientist tracking space debris. The collision between the commercial satellite, belonging to the American communications firm Iridium, and the Russian satellite, believed to be defunct based on its advanced age, was the first of its kind, says Nicholas Johnson, chief scientist at the NASA Orbital Debris Program at Johnson Space Center in Houston. (A spokesperson for Iridium said a statement on the incident would be released shortly.)*
"In the past almost 20 years, there have been three other accidental collisions between objects in orbit, but they've all been very minor," Johnson says. "The most debris ever produced in an event was like four debris, and this is two intact spacecraft colliding, and we have hundreds of debris out there. We don't know exactly how many yet."
According to Johnson, the military sky-watchers who track satellites in orbit picked up the collision 490 miles (790 kilometers) above Earth Tuesday. "One of the things that they discovered yesterday afternoon ... was all of a sudden, where two satellites used to be, there were two clouds of debris," he says. The actual crash appears to have occurred just minutes before noon, Eastern Standard Time.
Johnson says NASA has already determined that the debris cloud poses "no significant new risk to the International Space Station." The next space shuttle mission, which may launch as early as February 22, should be in the clear as well, according to the space agency.
Such a collision between two intact spacecraft may be unprecedented, but it is not completely unexpected. "There are no rules of the road in space," Johnson says. "Anybody can fly anywhere they want." Even concerted efforts to track and guide spacecraft in orbit are subject to some uncertainty in trajectory estimates. At seven miles (11 kilometers) per second, Johnson says, "a little error means a lot."
*UPDATE (7:10 P.M.): Iridium's statement confirms the loss of the satellite, calling the crash an "extremely unusual, very low-probability event." The company says its network of 66 satellites plus in-orbit spares "is uniquely designed to withstand such an event, and the company is taking the necessary steps to replace the lost satellite with one of its in-orbit spare satellites."
Image credit: ©iStockphoto/cristimatei
Tags:
space junk,
satellite collision,
Roscosmos,
spacecraft,
Iridium,
space accident,
space debris,
satellite break-up
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19 Comments
Add Commentwhere will the debris fall?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWill it fall? I don't think so, but if it does, it may burn before it gets to Earth. The problem is the danger the debris represents for other satellites.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh man, I wish there was video of that. It'd be neat to see such chaos unfold in zero gravity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnyway, there's too much space junk up there as it is. At some point, they're going to have to have a cleanup robot that pushes the old stuff (that's not capable of bringing itself down), to burn up in the atmosphere. ...so we can all breathe the particulates for years to come.
Hm.
My concern is that some of these older satellites could have nuclear material on board. Some of the Transit satellite series certainly did. So as more and more satellites are put into space the likely hood of these collisions increases.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI realize the amounts are small but we are talking about having it spread out across the sky as it reenters. It's just a bad deal.
I think the last one was put up in 1988 but we should try not to put more of that junk anywhere that has a likely hood of spreading through the ecosphere. Just a thought.
Oophs! it's just the begining of the yet another kind of traffic accidents that misht escalate with its destructive potential for the universe. Whats being done about it? whoes responsibility to clean up this muck?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIts a scientific junk...
um.... satelites don't accidently bump into each other.....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNasa or a commercial company needs to make a space junk recycler. It takes a lot of money to put that junk up there, we should use it for something i'm sure.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thislook this didn't happen tuesday it happened a couple of months ago. I actually saw a special on history channel three weeks ago that was about satellite debris in orbit and how this crash increased the number of debris particles monitered by nasa by like three fold. The crash wasn't an accident nasa moniter's every piece of space debris over 2 inches for crying out loud. China was responsible for the crash to show they have the capability. This just goes to show you how corrupt our system is
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere's a lot going on in the world right now you don't know about it takes weeks to filter through our media. you want real news look it up using something other u.s. based media corperations
Deija voo all over again. After all, the Chinese have done it, the USA followed suit and now the Russians gave a dab at it. It's just another coverup. So you see, the Chinese were the only ones to come clean on their intentions to see if they could do it. :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf we can not even track orbits of our own Earth satellites (surely the Iridium satellites have thruster capability), then what are the chances of detecting a mass-extinction or planet killing Near-Earth Object?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf we can not even track orbits of our own Earth satellites to prevent their multi-million dollar destruction (surely the Iridium satellite had thruster capability), then what do you think the chances are of detecting a mass-extinction / planet killing Near-Earth Object?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@whr1982 - you have to be a little more than paranoid to believe that they're lying about the objects in question. Satellites the size of Iridiums and larger are easily observable from the ground, literally millions of people have the capability to do it, and hundreds of them make a hobby of tracking and databasing satellite identity, location and predicted track info. A government coverup of "what really happened" here would be exposed by the international hobby community inside a month.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou have to consider that Iridium is operating 66 satellites which have "operational envelopes" that they have to stay within, and use of maneuvering fuel shortens the life of the craft. Face these off against thousands of tracked objects in similar orbits and the degree of uncertainty in actual position (say +/- 1km). Everyone knows the near-misses happen every day within that 1km uncertainty boundary, but when the satellites themselves are 100x smaller than their known trajectories, you're looking at 1/10,000 chance of actual collision for every known near miss about to happen - probably not worth maneuvering into another orbit where there's just another near-miss waiting to happen. If this happens much more, it will become economical to launch cleanup missions to de-orbit all this junk, but for now it's probably still cheaper to lose a satellite once every 50 years rather than trying to actively prevent it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt has been observed that the space collisions are increasing with the increasing number of satellites. Business-wise there should be a central controlling authority for the satellites as well, as their destruction is more polluting and financially hurting.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswhr1982,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow do you know it's the same crash? How did China make the crash happen? Were the pictures real? If this is true...this is really bad. Where do we look up this stuff as a double check? Lately, stupid and lying seen to be in the news everyday.
Sparkie,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou can start with a Google search of "satellite tracking", which should lead you pretty quickly to places like: http://www.n2yo.com/?s=24946 and http://www.heavens-above.com/
Iridium satellites are among the most popular for amateur tracking/watching, some of these amateurs take their hobby very seriously and could tell you if a (significant) unannounced control thrust has happened based on position that they observe with their own equipment.
Is there any chance that satellites could have small motors to drive them out of orbit when they are no longer useful?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSure, if there were any kind of regulation of LEO craft, that could be a design requirement, but current international satellite regulations seem\ to resemble high seas shipping laws circa 1500 - not much to it right now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWould it be possible to develop an extremly high powered ground based laser? the small parts could be tracked and incinerated removing the need to physicaly contact each object which of course is next to in impossible due to the cost and sheer number of objects .This would avoid weapons in space and also give the US the chance to respond to the chinese when they used a missile to down one of thier sattelites.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this