LeoLabs, in Silicon Valley, which has been monitoring the paths of a defunct Russian satellite and a discarded Chinese rocket segment, using radars to track objects in orbit, has estimated that they may come within 25 metres of each other. It sees them converging over Antarctica at 00:56 GMT (01:56 BST) on Friday.
With a combined mass at over 2.5 tonnes and relative velocity of 14.66km/s (32,800mph), any collision would be catastrophic and produce a shower of debris. Given the altitude of almost 1,000km, the resulting fragments would stay around for an extremely long time, posing a threat to operational satellites.
Neither Kosmos-2004, which was launched in 1989, nor the ChangZheng rocket stage, launched in 2009, can be moved. So, there is no possibility to influence the event.
Some experts who’ve looked at the available data think Kosmos-2004 and the ChangZheng rocket stage will pass with a far greater separation. Dr Moriba Jah, an astrodynamicist at the University of Texas at Austin, has worked out the miss distance to be about 70 metres. And the Aerospace Corporation, a highly respected consultancy, comes to a similar conclusion.
Whatever the distance, the proximity of the “remnants” is alarming …… :!:
As of January 2019, more than 128 million pieces of debris smaller than 1 cm (0.4 in), about 900,000 pieces of debris 1–10 cm, and around 34,000 of pieces larger than 10 cm were estimated to be in orbit around the Earth.
The video of orbiting space junk is terribly misleading. Each dot is way, way larger than they are in reality. The scale is out of all proportion. It makes it seem that any space craft orbiting the earth is bound to hit or be hit by some of that junk.
In reality, the manned ‘Skylab’, which goes whizzing around the earth at 18,000 mph, has not encountered any of that junk. Nor can any astronauts on ‘Skylab’ see any of that junk.
Skylab was the first United States space station, launched by NASA, occupied for about 24 weeks between May 1973 and February 1974. Skylab’s orbit gradually decayed and it disintegrated in the atmosphere on July 11, 1979, scattering debris across the Indian Ocean and Western Australia.
What a load of old bollox!
If the space junk was as large as shown in the animation, each piece would weigh over 200,000 tons and be as big as Cuba. The animation is so far out of perspective it’s a joke!
The surface of the earth is 196.9 million square miles…
Space begins at approximately 62 miles high…
Satellites (and space junk) orbit at between 300 - 600 miles for commercial and communication satellites, and between 600 - 1200 miles for military use…
Therefore if we extrapolate by 100 (which would be very conservative) we arrive at 19,690,000,000 square miles…
If we divide that by the number of items classed as space junk (128 million)
We find that each single piece of space junk has approximately 153.828 square miles to fly around in.
Considering some pieces of space junk are less than 10 centimetres in diameter, I would suggest that you could spend a lifetime zooming around in space and never encountering one piece of space junk…
Lets get things in proportion shall we…
With all due respect to Omah, this is no reflection on you, and I appreciate you bringing this to our attention.
It just goes to show, by the reaction of some posters, just how much information like this can be so misleading.
