Chinese satellite and Russian rocket piece may have crashed in space

A Chinese satellite mysteriously shattered in March, scattering into several dozen pieces. Now a Harvard astronomer has found out what probably happened: It appears to have collided with a piece of a Russian rocket.

“This appears to be the first major confirmed orbital collision in a decade,” said Jonathan McDowell, who spotted the likely crash in a US Space Force data log, on Twitter.

Space Force Sensors detected new debris from the disintegration of the Chinese satellite, dubbed Yunhai 1-02, in mid-March. Yunhai 1-02 launched in 2019, so he was relatively young and should have been in good enough shape not to collapse on his own. No verdict on the case has ever been announced.

But the Space Force quietly updated its catalog of space debris with a new clue on Saturday. Object 48078, a piece of a Russian Zenit-2 rocket that was launched in 1996, is now listed with a special note: “collision with a satellite”.

McDowell spotted this new listing and shared it on twitter. He went back to the orbital data and discovered that the piece of Russian rocket and the Yunhai satellite were passing within 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) of each other at the exact time and day that Yunhai was traveling. ‘is separated.

This passing distance is within the margin of error. The two objects would have circled the Earth faster than a bullet, so any contact would have resulted in an explosion of debris. The crash created 37 known pieces of debris, according to McDowell, although he added that there were likely more uncatalogued pieces.

The collision does not appear to have been “catastrophic,” McDowell said, as the Yunhai satellite has made several orbital adjustments since March, indicating that China can still control it.

“It’s a big deal,” McDowell told Insider. “It shows that these small, non-catastrophic crashes are becoming a thing – we’ll see more and more of them.”

The dangers of space debris

NASA / JSC Goddard Space Flight Center

The last time two large objects orbiting Earth crashed into each other was in 2009, when a defunct Russian military satellite crashed into an active Iridium communications satellite overhead. Siberia. This collision, along with a previous one in 2007, increased the amount of large debris in low Earth orbit by about 70%.

There have been several false alarms and close calls since then. A dead Soviet satellite and a discarded Chinese rocket body crossed paths in space in October, after orbital models suggested they were at a “very high risk” of collision. In January 2020, a dead space telescope and a former US Air Force satellite beat alarming odds of crashing over Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In both incidents, no one was able to control the satellites to avoid a collision.

Already, nearly 130 million space debris surrounds Earth – from abandoned satellites, crashed spacecraft and other missions. This debris travels at around 10 times the speed of a bullet, which is fast enough to inflict disastrous damage to vital equipment, regardless of the size of the parts. Such a blow could kill astronauts aboard a spaceship.

Nasa

Whenever orbiting objects collide, they can explode into new clouds of tiny pieces of debris at high speed. In fact, the piece of debris that struck the Chinese satellite may have detached from the original Russian rocket in an earlier collision.

“It’s very disturbing and it’s one more reason why you want to remove these large objects from orbit,” McDowell told Space.com, which first reported its discovery. “They can generate this other debris that is smaller.”

Experts expect more near-collisions like this if no one removes dead satellites and old rocket bodies from space.