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The first indication of whether the largest accidental space junk collision occurs on Friday likely comes from a multi-million dollar radar near Naseby in Central Otago.
The Californian company LeoLabs has confirmed its estimate that a Russian Cosmos spy satellite will crash into the discarded third stage of a Chinese CZ-4C rocket 991 kilometers above the Weddell Sea off Antarctica at 1.56pm on Friday time New Zealand.
LeoLabs predicted that there was now a greater than 10 percent chance of the objects colliding, after warning a 1 to 20 percent chance of collision on Thursday.
His best guess was that the two objects, which have a combined mass of 2,800 kilograms, would miss each other by just 12 meters, at a relative speed of almost 53,000 kilometers per hour.
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But he said the prediction could be 18 meters, which means there was a “very high risk of collision.”
LeoLabs said the Chinese rocket body was programmed to pass directly over its Naseby space junk radar shortly after the possible collision.
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The LeoLabs space junk radar near Naseby in Central Otago will be watching to see if the body of the Chinese rocket is intact or in pieces after Friday’s possible collision.
I’d use radar to check for debris.
The size and speed of the potential collision has the space industry at its limits.
Rocket Lab spokeswoman Morgan Bailey said Thursday that the entire industry would be watching with concern.
The risk has drawn comparisons to, but could be worse, than the 2009 collision between an Iridium communications satellite and another missing Russian Cosmos satellite with a combined mass of 1,510 kilograms that collided at a speed of 42,000 km / h in 2009.
That collision created more than 2,000 pieces of space debris large enough to destroy more satellites.
The European Space Agency reported that International Space (ISS) was forced to perform an urgent maneuver to avoid a piece of debris created by that collision, five years later, in 2014.
University of Auckland physics professor Richard Easther said that if a collision were to occur, the resulting debris would not pose an immediate risk to the ISS because it was in a rather different orbit.
