occur Thursday at 8:56 p.m. EDT (0056 GMT on Oct. 16) Event altitude: 991km
LeoLabs, a company that tracks space junk in Earth's orbit, announced it was monitoring a potential collision of two objects on October 16.
The objects—a defunct Soviet satellite and a discarded Chinese rocket stage—have a combined mass of approximately 6,170 pounds.
Experts fear the collision could spur a chain reaction of collisions, kicking the Kessler Syndrome into effect.
On Tuesday, LeoLabs, a company that monitors the paths of space junk in low-Earth orbit, announced on Twitter it was tracking a potential conjunction—that's space-speak for a mid-orbit crash—tonight between a defunct Soviet satellite and a discarded Chinese rocket stage.
"This is a potentially serious event. It is between 2 large objects and at high altitude, 991km," former astronaut and LeoLabs co-founder Ed Lu tweeted. "If there is a collision there will be lots of debris which will remain in orbit for a long time."
The combined mass of the two objects, which are expected to zip past each other at a whopping relative velocity of about 32,900 miles per hour, is an estimated 6,170 pounds. LeoLabs has since updated its models ... and things are looking grim.
According to the company's latest calculations, the objects are expected to come within 80 feet of each other (±59 feet). The probability of a collision is greater than 10 percent. If the satellites collide, the impact could spread a network of debris throughout low-Earth Orbit.
One of the objects is Parus 64 (Kosmos 2004), a Soviet navigation satellite, which launched on February 22, 1989 and weighs around 1,700 pounds. (It also has a 55-foot-long gravity boom, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophyics, who tracks space junk.) The other is a Chinese-made CZ-4C rocket stage, which is about 2o feet long and is suspected to have launched in 2004.
Link
The objects—a defunct Soviet satellite and a discarded Chinese rocket stage—have a combined mass of approximately 6,170 pounds.
Experts fear the collision could spur a chain reaction of collisions, kicking the Kessler Syndrome into effect.
On Tuesday, LeoLabs, a company that monitors the paths of space junk in low-Earth orbit, announced on Twitter it was tracking a potential conjunction—that's space-speak for a mid-orbit crash—tonight between a defunct Soviet satellite and a discarded Chinese rocket stage.
"This is a potentially serious event. It is between 2 large objects and at high altitude, 991km," former astronaut and LeoLabs co-founder Ed Lu tweeted. "If there is a collision there will be lots of debris which will remain in orbit for a long time."
The combined mass of the two objects, which are expected to zip past each other at a whopping relative velocity of about 32,900 miles per hour, is an estimated 6,170 pounds. LeoLabs has since updated its models ... and things are looking grim.
According to the company's latest calculations, the objects are expected to come within 80 feet of each other (±59 feet). The probability of a collision is greater than 10 percent. If the satellites collide, the impact could spread a network of debris throughout low-Earth Orbit.
One of the objects is Parus 64 (Kosmos 2004), a Soviet navigation satellite, which launched on February 22, 1989 and weighs around 1,700 pounds. (It also has a 55-foot-long gravity boom, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophyics, who tracks space junk.) The other is a Chinese-made CZ-4C rocket stage, which is about 2o feet long and is suspected to have launched in 2004.
Link
CZ-4C R/B passed over LeoLabs Kiwi Space Radar 10 minutes after TCA. Our data shows only a single object as we'd hoped, with no signs of debris. We will follow up in the coming days on Medium with a full in-depth risk assessment of this event!