photo: space.com
Scientist have warned for a time now that we are in for some dangerous fallout from possible satellite collisions or a satellite that is knocked off its orbit by a space object.
Many satellites are decades old and could possibly malfunction or fall out of orbit, even without a collision.
To underscore the warning, Space.com has published an interesting graphic of a space collision that occurred in January of this year.
A Chinese satellite that had been taken out of commission in 2007 after 8 years in orbit, eventually wound its way into an orbit loop that coincided with a small russian satellite orbiting path. A satellite 'kill' was executed by launching a small anti satellite device that collided with the Chinese object and shattered it into many pieces. The resulting debris field fanned out from the impact location and has since floated freely around the earth.
The Russian satellite was a small glass ball about 17 cm in diameter. The satellite rotated upon itself to maintain stability. It was used as a laser ranging target by the International Laser Ranging Service for a number of scientific experiments.
After the collision, ground control is trying to see where at least wo of the pieces of the Russian satellite will travel.
Source: Space.com 3.5.13
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