Earlier this year, an aging, defunct Russian Space Forces satellite,
Kosmos 2251, collided over Siberia with the US-based Iridium
Satellite, LLC‘s Iridium 33. The collision happened around noon Eastern time on February 11th. It destroyed the two satellites and left a new cloud of space debris in
an already overcrowded orbital neighborhood. This area is already thoroughly
littered, thanks, in part, to China’s decision to target one of its own
weather satellites with an anti-satellite weapon. Within a day
of the collision, the US space tracking systems had identified hundreds of individual pieces of debris.
When the two satellites collided, they were each traveling at a speed
of around 17,000mph relative to the Earth, and nearly 22,000mph relative to one another. The collision occurred over
northern Siberia (72.52 oN, 97.39 oE) at an altitude of 490 miles. Given
the limitations of the US space tracking system—it can only
reliably track debris particles greater than 5 to 10cm (2 to 4 inches)—it is hard to know exactly how much debris this
collision
has generated. To date, there have been 352 items identified
as coming from this collision.
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