A large BOINK! in Space
I hate it when that happens. From
Spaceflight Now:
Two satellites collide in orbit
In an unprecedented space collision, a commercial Iridium communications satellite and a defunct Russian satellite ran into each other Tuesday above northern Siberia, creating a cloud of wreckage, officials said today.
The international space station does not appear to be threatened by the debris, they said, but it's not yet clear whether it poses a risk to any other military or civilian satellites.
"They collided at an altitude of 790 kilometers (491 miles) over northern Siberia Tuesday about noon Washington time," said Nicholas Johnson, NASA's chief scientist for orbital debris at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "The U.S. space surveillance network detected a large number of debris from both objects."
Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael Carey, deputy director of global operations with U.S. Strategic Command, the agency responsible for space surveillance, said initial radar tracking detected some 600 pieces of debris. He identified the Russian spacecraft as Cosmos 2251, a communications relay station launched in June 1993, and said the satellite is believed to have been non-operational for the past 10 years or so.
And of course, birds built that long ago don't have the capacity to de-orbit when their mission is done. Current technology has small rockets that speed up the satellite's orbit until it touches the upper layers of the atmosphere. Friction and drag take over from there and the kibbles and bits fall into the Pacific Ocean.
Wonder how many spares Iridium has up there...
Posted by DaveH at February 11, 2009 9:19 PM