NEW DELHI: Nasa’s TIMED spacecraft and the defunct Russian spy satellite tv for pc Cosmos 2221 skilled an alarmingly shut encounter in orbit, house.com reported. Preliminary estimates recommended that the 2 satellites handed inside 65 ft (20 meters) of one another. Nonetheless, additional evaluation revealed that the precise distance was even nearer, with the satellites coming inside a mere 33 ft (10 meters) of each other, in line with Nasa deputy administrator Pam Melroy.
Melroy expressed her private shock and the priority shared by Nasa officers, stating, “Had the 2 satellites collided, we’d have seen vital particles era — tiny shards touring tens of 1000’s of miles an hour, ready to puncture a gap in one other spacecraft, probably placing human lives in danger.”
The problem of house particles is not only a hypothetical concern. In August 2021, the Chinese language army satellite tv for pc Yunhai 1-02 was struck by a bit of house junk, seemingly a fraction from a Russian Zenit-2 rocket launched in 1996. Whereas such collisions stay rare, close to misses just like the one involving TIMED have gotten more and more widespread as Earth’s orbit turns into extra congested.
At the moment, there are roughly 11,500 satellites orbiting Earth, with 9,000 of them being operational, in line with the European House Company (ESA). Greater than half of those purposeful satellites belong to SpaceX’s Starlink broadband community, which now consists of almost 5,800 satellites. Along with lively satellites, there are an estimated 36,500 items of house junk bigger than 4 inches (10 centimeters) and greater than 130 million fragments bigger than 1 millimeter in Earth’s orbit.
Nasa has been working to mitigate the house particles downside through the years, with efforts akin to implementing “common sense practices” like passivating rocket higher phases in orbit to scale back their explosive potential. Nonetheless, the company acknowledges the necessity for additional motion and has developed an built-in “house sustainability technique,” the primary a part of which was launched on the identical day as Melroy’s presentation.
(With inputs from businesses)
Melroy expressed her private shock and the priority shared by Nasa officers, stating, “Had the 2 satellites collided, we’d have seen vital particles era — tiny shards touring tens of 1000’s of miles an hour, ready to puncture a gap in one other spacecraft, probably placing human lives in danger.”
The problem of house particles is not only a hypothetical concern. In August 2021, the Chinese language army satellite tv for pc Yunhai 1-02 was struck by a bit of house junk, seemingly a fraction from a Russian Zenit-2 rocket launched in 1996. Whereas such collisions stay rare, close to misses just like the one involving TIMED have gotten more and more widespread as Earth’s orbit turns into extra congested.
At the moment, there are roughly 11,500 satellites orbiting Earth, with 9,000 of them being operational, in line with the European House Company (ESA). Greater than half of those purposeful satellites belong to SpaceX’s Starlink broadband community, which now consists of almost 5,800 satellites. Along with lively satellites, there are an estimated 36,500 items of house junk bigger than 4 inches (10 centimeters) and greater than 130 million fragments bigger than 1 millimeter in Earth’s orbit.
Nasa has been working to mitigate the house particles downside through the years, with efforts akin to implementing “common sense practices” like passivating rocket higher phases in orbit to scale back their explosive potential. Nonetheless, the company acknowledges the necessity for additional motion and has developed an built-in “house sustainability technique,” the primary a part of which was launched on the identical day as Melroy’s presentation.
(With inputs from businesses)
