The two satellites came to within less than 30 feet of each other back in February, a distance far closer than initial estimates suggested.
That was a really close one. Further analysis of a near-miss collision between two satellites in space revealed that they came even closer to one another than initially believed, raising more alarm over the growing danger of space debris . In late February, NASA’s TIMED spacecraft and the defunct Russian Cosmos 2221 nearly avoided crashing into one another, which would have added thousands of space junk fragments in low Earth orbit.
The two satellites cannot be maneuvered, and so there was nothing to be done as they traveled too close to one another in orbit. “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,” Melroy is quoted as saying.
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