Debris from a controversial 2007 missile test collided with a Russian
satellite earlier this year, rendering the BLITS satellite unusable, a
researcher said Saturday.
FULL STORY
(CNN) -- A piece of space debris left over from a
2007 Chinese missile test collided with a Russian satellite earlier this
year, rendering the satellite unusable, a researcher said Saturday.
Chinese space debris hits Russian satellite, scientists say
The BLITS satellite now faces away from Earth and is unusable, according to the Center for Space Standards & Innovation.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- The collision has rendered the Russian satellite, used to reflect laser beams, unusable
- The debris is left over from a 2007 Chinese missile launch on their own weather satellite
- The collision happened January 22 but was only discovered last month
- The incident highlights the problem of collisions involving space debris
The collision appears to
have happened January 22. That's when it's thought a piece of the Feng
Yun 1C weather satellite, which was destroyed in the 2007 missile test,
accidentally hit the Russian satellite, said T.S. Kelso, a senior
research astrodynamicist at the Center for Space Standards &
Innovation.
The collision changed the
orientation and orbit of the Russian satellite, which was being used in
scientific experiments, Kelso said. It may have also damaged it.
"There has been a piece
of debris catalogued by U.S. Strategic Command as a result of that
collision," Kelso said. "That would suggest that at least a part of the
satellite broke off because of the collision."
It was February 4 when
two scientists with the Institute for Precision Instrument Engineering
in Moscow noticed a change in the orbit of the satellite, known as
BLITS, Kelso said.
The scientists estimated
the change happened January 22. They contacted Kelso because CSSI
operates a service that looks for close satellite approaches, he said.
CSSI looked for objects
that may have had a nearby approach with the BLITS satellite around the
time of the collision. The Chinese debris was the only object they
found.
Although the predicted
distance between the debris and the satellite seemed to preclude a
collision, the fact that the close approach happened within 10 seconds
of the change in orbit made the Feng Yun 1C debris the likely culprit,
Kelso wrote in a blog post.
CSSI is now working with the Russian scientists to find out more about the collision.
BLITS is a small glass
sphere that reflected laser beams for research. Because of the
collision, the satellite now faces the wrong way and can't be used,
Kelso said.
The collision also sped up the satellite's spin period from 5.6 seconds to 2.1 seconds, Kelso said.
China launched the Feng
Yun 1C polar orbit weather satellite in 1999. It was destroyed in 2007
when China targeted it for a test of a ground-based, medium-range
ballistic missile.
U.S. tracking sensors
determined the missile collision created hundreds of pieces of space
debris, according to a U.S. official at the time. The test prompted
formal protests from the United States and several U.S. allies including
Canada and Australia.
The problem of collisions involving space debris is not a new one.
"Collisions happen all
the time, everywhere. Big collisions -- now those are the rare ones,"
said space debris expert William Schonberg, chairman of the Civil,
Architectural and Environmental Engineering Department at the Missouri
University of Science and Technology.
The last major space
debris collision was in 2009 between Iridium 33, an operational U.S.
communications satellite, and Cosmos 2251, a decommissioned Russian
satellite, Kelso said.
Scientists know of only a
handful of such collisions, but that's only because they happened with
objects that were being monitored. Kelso and Schonberg say it's likely
there are other "junk to junk" collisions involving unmonitored objects
that no one knows about.
In the case of the
Russian satellite in January, "it would have been very difficult to tell
there had been a collision if it hadn't been for the fact that somebody
was operating the satellite and noticed a collision," said Kelso.
Experts and leading
government agencies have been working on the space junk problem for
decades, but it's a tricky one to solve, Schonberg told CNN.
Trying to catch or
deflect debris runs the risk of making the problem worse, he said. The
debris could shatter into more pieces or change orbit and be on a
collision course with something else.
Some soft-impact lasers
can nudge objects into a calculated orbit toward Earth so they will be
pulled down and burn up in the atmosphere, Schonberg said. But
scientists must make sure that happens over an ocean to minimize danger
to people.
"Our technology has not caught up with our desire to clean up our mess" in space, Schonberg said.
"If nothing else," said
Kelso, this collision "was a bit of a reminder that it will likely
happen again, and maybe we should get back to work trying to figure out
what to do about it."
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