Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 collide
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An operational American communications satellite and a defunct Russian military satellite collided at an altitude of about 790 kilometres over Siberia, at a closing speed on the order of eleven kilometres per second. It was the first accidental hypervelocity collision between two intact satellites, and it produced roughly two thousand catalogued fragments. Thirty-one years after the collision cascade was described in the literature, the mechanism was demonstrated — and the demonstration made conjunction assessment and collision avoidance a routine operating cost for every satellite operator rather than an abstraction.
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Connections · 2
- Orbital debrisevidence_for
- The Kessler collision cascadeconcerns
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