On 15th of October, Thursday evening, two large pieces of orbital debris and a defunct Soviet navigation satellite and a Chinese rocket body spent whizzed safely in the past each other high over the South Atlantic Ocean. The two defunct satellites, the infrared Astronomical Satellite, is the one, and the other is Gravity Gradient Stabilization Experiment, cruised safely in the skies above Pittsburgh.
The California based space tracking company LeoLabs have notified the whole world ahead of time to the close proceed towards which materialized at 8:56 pm EDT. The two craft flew about 616 miles above the Earth just off the coast of Antarctica.
The near-miss of space junk took place at 6:39 om, according to EST and 23:39 GMT. It was expected and various analyses over the past days by California based trucking company LeoLabs and had pegged the probability of a collision at 0.1% to 5%. NASA has declared officially and told that the US military’s 18th Space Control Squadron, which tracks space debris and satellite, will have a 0.7% chance of colliding.
The California based trucking company LeoLabs pre-interviewed and analyses that the two objects would miss each other by 82 feet only plus or minus 59 feet numbers which left a collision very much in play or progress. Besides this, LeoLabs calculated the odds of a smashup at more than 10%. In the first several radar passes of the two objects after the close approach, we see no new debris.
A smashup was possible, but it could have been worst indeed. Nearly 2,400-Ib IRAS and the 190-Ib GGSE-4 travels very fast. A collision would likely have created around hundreds of pieces o debris, which was said by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. He keeps tabs on various objects circling Earth by using publicly available US tracking data.
Many of that debris has stayed in IRAS orbit, a sun-synchronous path that favors many kinds of weather and spy satellites.
McDowell said there is already a lot of debris in that orbit, and adding more would not be a good option. There is a lot of good economic development with new satellites going into space, but they are faced with a debris problem that already exists.
So, that’s the problem that we need to prevent its growth because we can’t clean it up aftermaths.
Several reasons include the decline in the chat of constructing and launching satellites and the building out of internet mega-constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink network.