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The trajectories of the Soviet satellite Parus (red) heading south and the Chinese rocket stage CZ-4C-Y4 (purple) heading north. Jonathan McDowell / Twitter
Tonight, a dead Soviet satellite and the body of a discarded Chinese rocket will fly towards each other, reaching a distance of up to 12 meters (39 feet) and have a high probability of crashing somewhere over the South Atlantic Ocean.
According to satellite and space debris tracking company LeoLabs, there is a 10 percent chance that the two dead spacecraft will collide at 8:56 p.m. ET. It may not sound like a big risk, but it is significant in aerospace terms. (NASA will move the International Space Station if its chance of hitting another object is greater than 0.001 percent.)
“This event is still very high risk and will probably stay that way until the closest moment,” LeoLabs tweeted Tuesday night.
1 / This event is still very high risk and will likely remain that way during the closest approach time. Our system generates new conjunction reports 6 to 8 times a day on this event with new observation data each time. pic.twitter.com/d3tRbcV2P0
– LeoLabs, Inc. (@LeoLabs_Space) October 14, 2020
The two large chunks of space debris currently orbit Earth at an altitude of around 615 miles. At that point, a collision will pose no danger to anyone on Earth. But if it happens, the explosion would send thousands of smaller fragments of debris in all directions, increasing the risk of future collisions in space.
“It’s maybe a much bigger problem than many people think,” LeoLabs CEO Dan Ceperley told Business Insider. “If this does turn into a collision, it is probably thousands or tens of thousands of new fragments of debris that will cause a headache for any satellite heading into the lower upper orbit of the Earth, or even beyond.”
The Soviet spacecraft in question is a retired navigation satellite called Published (Kosmos-2004) launched in 1989. It is about 17 meters (56 feet) high and 2 meters (6 feet) in diameter and weighs 800 kilograms (1,760 pounds). The body of the Chinese rocket is a third stage CZ-4C that measures approximately 7.5 meters (25 feet) long and 2.9 meters (9.5 feet) in diameter.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tweeted images of the two spacecraft as they were both operating.
The Parus satellite was designed by ISS Reshetnev in Zheleznogorzk and built by PO Polyot in Omsk. Images from https://t.co/RKpKKcVDKv pic.twitter.com/miw9f3A3f8
– Jonathan McDowell (@ planet4589) October 14, 2020
Here is my own visualization of the encounter. Kosmos-2004 (red) is heading south towards the pole, CZ-4C-Y4 (purple) is heading north towards the Falklands pic.twitter.com/qem7ojlhcy
– Jonathan McDowell (@ planet4589) October 14, 2020
Space debris is a growing concern for scientists and commercial players. According to the latest count by the European Space Agency, there are more than 34,000 objects larger than 10 cm in diameter moving at high speed in Earth’s orbit. These include thousands of missing and operational satellites, spacecraft, and scrap parts from other missions.
And busy satellite missions, particularly SpaceX’s Starlink, are making Earth’s orbit even more crowded.
Last week, the CEO of rocket launch startup Rocket Lab, Peter Beck, told CNN that the sheer number of objects in space right now has made it difficult and dangerous to launch space missions. He said the company recently had to choose a half dozen separate launch windows to find a clear path without colliding with any Starlink satellites.
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