Official News page 7

REAL LIFE NEWS: WHEN SATELLITES COLLIDE

by Hazed

There are so many satellites orbiting the Earth now, it's a wonder that there haven't been any accidents before. But now two of them have collided - a US satellite owned by Iridium and a defunct Russian satellite crashed into each other on Tuesday. Both were travelling at speed, and the impact has resulted in a cloud of dust and debris which will take weeks to disperse.

NASA is tracking the hundreds of pieces of wreckage, and it hopes that most of them will burn up in the Earth's atmosphere. The risk is that they will stray into the path of other satellites and cause more damage. In particular, they are tracking whether the International Space Station could be at risk - it orbits the planet about 270 miles below the course of the collision.

Fortunately, the ISS is manoeuvrable. NASA spokesman John Yembrick said that it has the "capability of doing a debris-avoidance manoeuvre if necessary," although it's only had to do this eight times before.

Since the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, about 6,000 have been sent into orbit. About 3,000 of them remain in operation, NASA says. Is anyone acting as a space traffic cop? If not, it seems likely that there will be more collisions in the future. More information about the monitoring of satellites and other space objects here.

Maybe they need to fit satellites with bumpers...

Meanwhile, here's a gallery of bits of space debris that have fallen to Earth.

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page