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Satellites Collide In Orbit

Posted by samzenpus on from the starpocalypse dept.

DrEnter writes "According to this story on Yahoo, two communications satellites collided in orbit, resulting in two large clouds of debris. The new threat from these debris clouds hasn't been fully determined yet. From the article, 'The collision involved an Iridium commercial satellite, which was launched in 1997, and a Russian satellite launched in 1993 and believed to be nonfunctioning. Each satellite weighed well over 1,000 pounds.' This is the fifth spacecraft/satellite collision to occur in space, but the other four were all fairly minor by comparison."

6 of 456 comments (clear)

  1. This was bound to happen. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    These satellites were Iridium33 (24946) and K-2251 (22675). Now they are pieces of debris from bowling ball sized pieces to vapor.

    A nice little animation of the collision is placed here:

    http://i39.tinypic.com/2vbk75z.gif

    This was bound to happen and will happen again. The interesting question is how come they didn't maneuver one of them out of the way. I don't know if 22675 is an active payload that still has power but Iridium33 certainly has the capability of moving. This one was avoidable. Even my non rocket science brain can take the TLEs and figure out that they were passing way too close to each other (I put it at about 500 meters with the latest elements).

    Unfortunately, this didn't create 2 'clouds' of debris. This created one huge field of debris that will continue to expand over time. Many of the pieces will be tracked but the very small pieces cannot be.

    It would have been way cool to observe the collision!

    1. Re:This was bound to happen. by palndrumm · · Score: 5, Informative

      http://www.snopes.com/military/lighthouse.asp

  2. 5th collision?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I know of 3 previous collisions.

    1991-12-23 COSMOS vs. COSMOS DEB (discovered in 2005)
    1996-07-24 CERISE vs. Ariane R/B
    2005-01-17 Thor Burner vs. CZ-4 DEB

    What's the 4th previous??

  3. Re:Expanding debris cloud by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_Syndrome

  4. Re:Was this really bound to happen? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Informative post but just one correction, at end of life the birds in geo RAISE their orbit. Decay takes so long that the graveyard orbits are stable over pretty much everyone's planning horizon (centuries+). If collisions occur up there then relative velocities are hopefully small enough to limit the debris field.

  5. Re:YES, they are! by John+Hasler · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Iridium constellation consists of 66 satellites plus spares, one of which will be moved into position to replace this one. They've lost satellites before.

    --
    Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.