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For a time this week, it appears that there could be an impact in orbit around the Earth between two pieces of space junk that could damage other satellites. Two pieces of space junk included a missing Soviet satellite and a discarded Chinese booster rocket. The two were heading towards each other Thursday night and they narrowly missed each other.
A company called LeoLabs, a private space-tracking company, uses ground-based radar to track space objects and had predicted the chance of a collision by 10 percent or more. The company’s chief executive said that while there was a high probability of a collision, the situation was not uncommon. The US military had predicted a near zero percent chance of the objects colliding.
The army made its estimates based on data from the world’s largest radar and telescope network. A scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, Moriba Jah, has been trying to raise public awareness about the vast abundance of space debris orbiting the planet. He says there is a constant risk of collision, and this latest test was the most recent evidence of the need for an international effort to track space debris.
Jah says his data shows there are dozens of possible collisions at any given time. He also said that the missing satellite and the booster rocket were expected to be within 72 meters of each other. However, he was also unable to determine whether or not the objects would collide until the event passed.
The LeoLabs CEO said his company wanted to raise public awareness of the event because the two objects were large and in a relatively clean orbit compared to nearby ones. The company also wants to raise general awareness about the problem of space debris to encourage the private sector to clean it up. He said that several times a week the satellites come within 100 meters of each other.
