It's bad enough that we've already done a pretty good job of polluting the earth we've been given, but now apparently mankind's efforts in space are also being compromised by unnecessary debris.
On January 22 a piece of debris resulting from China's destruction of their weather satellite in 2007 is believed to be the culprit of a collision that maimed a Russian satellite . According to T.S. Kelso of the Center for Space Standards & Innovation (CSSI), the collision changed the orientation and orbit of the Russian satellite.
"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."
On February 4 two scientists at the Institute for Precision Instrument Engineering in Moscow noticed a change in the orbit of the satellite. They estimated that the collision occurred on January 22 and contacted Kelso, who's organization CSSI catalogs close satellite approaches. The Chinese debris was the only object that was approaching the satellite at that time.
Initially the predicted path of the debris seemed to rule it out as the guilty party, but the fact that the collision occurred within 10 seconds of when the Chinese debris would have passed the satellite left little doubt as to what happened.
China's Feng Yun 1C polar orbit weather satellite was destroyed in 2007 when the Chinese government decided to end its service by testing a ground-based, medium-range ballistic missile on the satellite. That reckless decision immediately drew the ire of many other nations, including the United States and Canada, and it's consequences are still being realized.
"There has been a piece of debris catalogued by U.S. Strategic Command as a result of that collision," says Kelso. "That would suggest that at least a part of the satellite broke off because of the collision."
What's worse, this is not the first time that man-made debris has caused problems for functioning satellites in orbit. In 2009 the operational U.S. communications satellite Iridium 33 collided with Cosmos 2251, a decommissioned Russian satellite.
"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."
