Higher Risks for Spacecrafts

The unprecedented collision between U.S. and Russian communications satellites could further damage the Hubble Space Telescope and the debris resulted from the impact will pose a threat for all satellites as it will circle the Earth for thousands of years, said Vladimir Solovyov, the chief of Russia's Mission Control.

The collision occurred two days ago 480 miles (780 km) up over Siberia. The two satellites were Cosmos 2251, a non-operational communications satellite launched in 1993 by the Russian Ministry of Defense, and the Iridium 33, one of the numerous satellites of the globe-girding commercial communications network.

The collision sent an unknown number of shards in on the orbit. About 600 of them were already logged by the U.S. military's worldwide satellite-tracking network.

The Hubble Space Telescope is orbiting 75 miles below where the collision took place, so the risk of another impact is very high. There are an estimated 17,000 man-made objects above 10cm in size that orbit Earth, so the risk of collision is considerably high.

Mr. Solovyov said the pieces resulted from the collision of the two satellites could orbit the Earth for more than 10,000 years and even the small fragments could severely damage spacecrafts made of light alloys. The approximate number of pieces resulted from the collision and how they're distributed in orbit will be found out after space experts carry out a debris census that will take them at least a week.

Wonder why so much debris resulted from the collision?

The two satellites that crashed into each other weighed more than 1,000 pounds each and were going 17,500 miles an hour. It is the first collision of this kind in space. It is still unknown how the Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 ended up on a collision course, but it surely was an accident.

Both satellites had high-inclination orbits (Cosmos 2251 at 74°, Iridium 33 at 86°). This means some of the 1½ tons of fragments resulted from the collision could end up much higher or much lower than the crash place depending on their speeds after the crash.

However, although this crash was the first of its kind, when it comes to a debris-generating events, it totally pales in front of China’s January destroying of Fengyun 1 in 11, 2007.

Beijing launched a ballistic weapon that hit the Fengyun 1 and created a hazardous cloud of shards at altitudes ranging from 300 to 2,500 miles. The impact generated a total nearly 2,400, the equivalent of about a quarter of all objects being tracked at low orbital altitudes. The number of smaller bits, ranging from 1 to 5 cm, is above 150,000.

Ironically, this happened about five years after China’s National Space Administration (CNSA) signed a United Nations agreement to help reduce the amount of space debris.