An unprecedented incident took place almost 500 miles above northern Siberia, as a privately held commercial communications satellite and a defunct Russian satellite bumped into each other. Officials confirmed the incident, which took place on Tuesday, leaving behind a considerable amount of debris.
Nicholas Johnson of NASA’s Johnson Space Center confirmed in a statement that the satellites collided at an altitude of 790 kilometers (491 miles) above northern Siberia, at around noon Washington time, and that the U.S. space surveillance network detected a large number of debris from both objects.
However, he added, the debris is unlikely to affect the International Space Station and its crew, stationed over 200 miles above Earth. Furthermore, this incident is not expected to cause any delay in launching the next space shuttle.
Nothing to this extent (has happened before), Johnson said, according to CBS News. We’ve had three other accidental collisions between what we call catalog objects, but they were all much smaller than this and always a moderate sized objects and a very small object. And these are two relatively big objects. So this is a first, unfortunately.
Air Force Brig. Gen Michael Carey, deputy director of global operations with U.S. Strategic Command, confirmed to the same source that the collision resulted in an estimated 600 pieces of debris.
It’s going to take about two days before we get a solid picture of what the debris field looks like, Carey said. But you, I think, can imply that the majority of that should be probably along the same line as the original orbits, he continued.
The U.S. satellite has been identified as an Iridium communications satellite, while the Russian satellite has been identified as Cosmos 2255, launched in 1993 and believed to have been non-operational for the past decade.
Iridium Satellite LLC confirmed the incident in a statement released on Wednesday:
Yesterday, Iridium Satellite LLC lost an operational satellite […] Although this event has a minimal impact on Iridium’s service, the company is taking immediate action to address the loss. The Iridium constellation is healthy, and this event is not the result of a failure on the part of Iridium or its technology.
The company also explained that while this was an unusual and very low-probability event, their constellation was designed to withstand it, and the lost satellite will soon be replaced with an in-orbit spare satellite.
The satellites are normally being well monitored in order to prevent incidents such as this one from ever happening. The odds of a collision between satellites are indeed small, and the chances for the two satellites mentioned earlier to collide seemed even smaller, according to estimations by NASA’s Johnson Space Center. But, this small chance unfortunately didn’t prevent them from running into each other.
