October 16, 2020

Anna Murray 

On the evening of October 15, two orbiting space debris, consisting of a defunct Soviet satellite and a discarded Chinese rocket booster, passed in a close range and avoid collision into each other high over the South Atlantic Ocean. Otherwise, the collision would have been catastrophic and produced massive debris.

According to the information described from space scientists, the defunct Soviet satellite Kosmos-2004, approximately 55 feet long and weighed 2,000 pounds, was launched to space in 1989 for navigation usage. And the discarded Chinese rocket booster, about 20 feet long, partly the object of a Chinese Long March (also known as ChangZheng) launch rocket launched in 2009.

Both the CEO and cofounder Dan Ceperley of LeoLabs, Inc. in Menlo Park of California and Dr. Moriba Jah of Strauss Center at the University of Texas at Austin have conducted regular space tracking and alerted the world ahead of time about a possible orbital collision between these two space junks.

Last collision of two space objects happened in 2009. Right then a defunct Russian military satellite ram into an active operational US telecommunication satellite by Iridium Satellite Communications. Even till now the collision had produced lots of small fragments in orbit which continually kept posing a threat to wreck nearby satellites.

For years the growing congestion in space debris has already been warned by space traffic experts. But satellite companies and governments have not yet been cooperative in dealing with the scenario.

Photo:Webshot.