The incident that occurred two days ago and involved two satellites which slammed into one another appears to be threatening the Hubble Space Telescope.

The collision, which involved a Russian satellite and an American one, was extremely powerful, as each one weighed more than 1,000 pounds and traveled at a speed of more than 17,500 miles per hour. The crash smashed the two satellites into numerous pieces, which are now floating around. Even though the telescope is orbiting 75 miles below where the collision took place (it happened over Siberia at an altitude of 491 miles), experts believe that there is a very big risk involved.

"Clearly debris from the event is going through the altitude that the Hubble flies, so we're going to be looking at what is the new risk to Hubble," explained Nicholas Johnson, chief scientist at the Orbital Debris Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center.  

The matter is currently being investigated, as such an incident has never happened before and there are still no clues on how the Iridium communications satellite and the old Russian Cosmos satellite ended up on a collision course. To a certain extent, it is understandable, as the radars and ground-based cameras keep track of more than 13,000 orbiting objects. Such a demanding task is bound to record some slipups from time to time, and considering that this is the first one, the people involved managed to do a great job so far.

Many of the pieces are expected to remain in the orbit for decades and others for more than a century.