Satellites Collide Over Siberia

Back in the 1960 a movie came out titled, "The Crowded Sky". It was about a military aircraft that collides with a civilian airliner. The implication was that though things look clear over our heads, it's actually quite a busy place.

The same can be said for space, or at least the space surrounding our planet. Thousands of satellites and various bits of space debris orbit the earth and amazingly are tracked by scientists on the ground. Those small bits of used rocket boosters and chunks of old space craft that have not fallen into the atmosphere and been incinerated pose a threat to space travelers. Think of that space junk as the pellets of a shotgun. The speed they travel makes them lethal to other spacecraft.

Today comes news that two satellites have collided. The event took place about 500 miles above Siberia when a dead Russian communications satellite smashed into an operating "Iridium" communications satellite. Iridium was the system of low orbiting satellites Motorola put into orbit back in the late 1990's. Economically unsuccessful due to the high cost of Iridium phones the system was later resurrected and forms a big part of our communications network, especially the military.

Luckily, the Iridium system has spare satellites in orbit to take up the slack, some 60 in all. However, the cloud of debris caused by the violent impact will bear watching. Another couple of hundred chunks of space junk must now be tracked and it all makes getting off our small blue planet just that much more difficult.

The craft weighed about a ton each, far from the Sputnik sized image many of us have of what satellites look like. Imagine a couple of Volkswagens colliding at a few hundred miles an hour and you get the picture.