[ad_1]
A dead Soviet satellite and an abandoned Chinese rocket quickly crashed into each other in space this week, but they were far from a catastrophic accident Thursday night.
Leo Labs, a company that uses space-based radar and debris tracking satellites, He said On Tuesday it said it was monitoring a “very high risk” conjunction – an intersection of the orbits of two objects around Earth.
The company used its radar array to monitor every other object when it crossed the roof three or four times a day since Friday.
Data indicates two large pieces of space junk are missing from each other 8 to 43 meters (26 to 141 feet) Thursday night at 8:56 pm
On Wednesday, when the estimated failure distance was just 12 meters (19 feet), Leo Labs calculated a 10 percent chance of hitting objects.
It may seem trivial, but NASA typically moves the International Space Station when the orbiting laboratory is only 0.001 percent (1 in 100,000) more likely to encounter an object.
Since both the Soviet satellite and the Chinese rocket body were not working, no one could pull them out of each other. The astronomer said that if they were ide, a blast equivalent to TNT’s 14-metric-ton blast would send rockets of debris in all directions. Jonathan McDowell.
10 minutes after the merger, when the body of the rocket flew over Leo Labs’ radar, there was only one object: the company tweeted that “there was no sign of debris.”
“Bullet Dodge”, McDowell He said On twitter. “But space debris is still a big problem.”
The collision may not have endangered anyone on Earth, as the satellites are 991 kilometers (616 miles) from Earth and crossing the Antarctic Ocean over the Veddel Sea. But as a result, thousands of spaceship fragments were dangerous in Earth’s orbit.
Experts at Aerospace Corporation have calculated very few collisions: 1 in just 23 billion as of Thursday morning, with objects estimated to miss within 70 meters (230 feet) of each other.
“The space wreck community is constantly alerting us to these narrow policies, and we are not lying or lying about it,” Ted Mulhapt, who oversees space wreck analysis for The Aerospace Corporation, told Business Insider.
“Any of them is a low probability event, because the space is still very large. But when you take these items and combine them, sooner or later you will see the rewards. It’s time for us to go through another big collision with our models. “
Space collisions create high-speed hazardous debris clouds
Nearly 130 million bits of space junk currently orbiting Earth, from abandoned satellites, separate spacecraft, and other missions. That debris travels at roughly 10 times the speed of a bullet, which is fast enough to cause fatal damage to important equipment, no matter how small the pieces are.
Such a hit can kill astronauts on a spaceship.
The problem is compounded when collisions between pieces of space junk cause objects to disintegrate into smaller pieces.
“Every time there is a big conflict, it is a big change at LEO [low-Earth orbit] Environment, ”Dan Sepperley, CEO of Leo Labs previously told Business Insider.
Two events in 2007 and 2009 increased the size of large debris in low Earth orbit by 70 percent.
The first was China’s test of an anti-satellite missile, in which China fired one of its own weather satellites. Two years later, an American spacecraft accidentally struck a Russian.
“So now there’s a rubble belt,” Sepperley said.
India conducted its own satellite missile test in 2019, and that explosion generated a prediction of 6,500 ruins larger than the draft.
The satellite fired by India has a mass of less than a metric ton.
Combined, the Soviet satellite and the Chinese rocket looking out for each other weighed nearly three metric tons (2,800 kilograms). Depending on those large volumes, the collision could create a significant cloud of hazardous debris.
High-risk satellite combinations are becoming more common
This is not the first time that Leo Labs has warned the world about the possibility of a high-risk satellite merger. In January, the company calculated the Collision between the Dead Space Telescope and the old US Air Force satellite.
The objects did not collide, but Seperley said the two satellites were “canceled, so basically no one was watching.”
The US Air Force, which tracks satellites for the government, did not inform NASA of the possible collision, the space agency told Business Insider at the time.
Expert warnings about space debris became even more urgent from that glitch.
“We recently determined the number of combinations,” Dan Oltrog, an astronomer, told Business Insider, who investigated orbital debris at Analytical Graphics, Inc.
Oltrose uses a software system that has been collecting and estimating conjunction data for the past 15 years. In recent times in orbital encounters, he says, “it seems to be well connected with the newly launched large star cluster spacecraft.”
The largest constellations it represents are the Internet satellite clusters, which companies like SpaceX, Amazon and OneWeb plan to launch. In total, the companies plan to launch more than 100,000 satellites by the end of the decade. Since May 2019, SpaceX has already launched nearly 800 new satellites into Earth orbit.
The rubble catastrophe may reduce our access to space
If the space debris problem escalates, the chain of collisions will spiral out of control and surround Earth in an impassable field of debris. Donald J. Snyder, who worked at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and calculated in a 1978 paper.
“It’s a long-term impact that will last for decades and centuries,” Mulhapt told Business Insider in January. “Anything that makes a lot of debris increases that risk.”
The number of objects in Earth’s orbit could already have an effect similar to Kessler’s, a risk described last week by Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck.
“It will have a huge impact on the launch side,” he told CNN Business, Rockets “should try to weave [satellite] Constellations “
This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
More from Business Insider:
[ad_2]
