Space Debris Update- Near Misses
Two near miss events in last two months show the growing problem of space debris and need for better management and controls
Just a quick Friday update on this piece from two week’s ago with two recent near miss events:
Collision with Orbital Debris damages Chinese Tiangong Space Station
Reports are now coming out that Taikonauts (that’s how you say Astronaut in CCP) had to perform a spacewalk to repair cables to the solar panels damaged by Space Debris collisions:
"The space station's core module Tianhe had suffered a partial loss of power supply due to the impact of the space debris on the solar wing's power cables," Xinhua reported, paraphrasing CMSA deputy director Lin Xiqiang.
Hey wait a second, the Chinese have their own space station? I thought that was just a Deus Ex Machina prop in that Gravity movie to fill a plot hole? Yes, they do and it looks like this:
This is the third generation of Chinese space station and carries up to six Taikonauts. It’s about 1/3 the size of the International Space Station but it’s vintage is much newer so it will almost certainly outlive its larger brethren. The Chinese actually have a fairly robust manned space program with almost 30 launches since the 90s.
NASA remote sensing satellite almost lost in near-collision with dead Russian spy satellite
In late February we had another near-collision between a NASA space weather satellite called TIMED and a dead Russian spy satellite designated Kosmos 2221, which we are just now learning more about. As this article in Space.com points out, we are now learning that the near-miss was less than a solar panel length apart - 33 feet! Yikes! More here:
"We recently learned through analysis that the pass ended up being less than 10 meters [33 feet] apart — within the hard-body parameters of both satellites…"Had the two satellites collided, we would have seen significant debris generation — tiny shards traveling tens of thousands of miles an hour, waiting to puncture a hole in another spacecraft, potentially putting human lives at risk." (NASA Deputy Administrator Pam) Melroy said April 9 during a presentation at the 39th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.
TIMED has been in orbit for about 20 years and helps us understand the solar cycle and how it impacts satellites and systems on earth. This is critical for things like launch timing and any sort of defensive measures we take for solar flares and other events that can impact both terrestrial and space based assets. Kosmos 2221 is a dead Russian ELINT bird that is still on orbit even though it was launched over 30 years ago (just goes to show you that de-orbiting doesn’t always happen as planned).
Not to make the same point again but near miss or grazing blow incidents like these are going to proliferate— and god forbid we have a real event that could pollute a whole orbit-- until we get a better handle on how to handle the space traffic control problem and get serious about mitigating the space debris we are leaving behind.