Two big satellites collide

Hurriyet Daily News with wires

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As scientists were keeping a close eye on orbital debris yesterday, NASA said it would take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the crash, which occurred nearly 500 miles (800 kilometers) over Siberia on Tuesday.

"We knew this was going to happen eventually," said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA believes any risk to the space station and its three astronauts is low. It orbits about 270 miles (430 kilometers) below the collision course. There also should be no danger to the space shuttle set to launch with seven astronauts on Feb. 22, officials said, but that will be re-evaluated in the coming days.

A spokesman for the Russian civilian space agency Roscosmos, Alexander Vorobyev, said on state-controlled Channel I television that "for the international space station, at this time and in the near future, there's no threat."

The collision involved an Iridium commercial satellite, which was launched in 1997, and a Russian satellite launched in 1993 and believed to be nonfunctioning. The Russian satellite was out of control, Matney said.

Concerns over space traffic

The Iridium weighed 1,235 pounds (560 kilograms), and the Russian craft nearly a ton. No one has any idea yet how many pieces were generated or how big they might be. This was the first high-speed impact between two intact spacecraft, NASA officials said. There have been four other cases in which space objects have collided accidentally in orbit, NASA said. But those were considered minor and involved parts of spent rockets or small satellites.

An unprecedented collision will fuel concern over the lack of traffic controls in space and the rising volumes of junk that endanger vital satellites and manned flight.

The incident raises grave questions over how it was allowed to happen and what will become of the cloud of orbital debris, which adds to one of the biggest headaches in space, experts say.

Philippe Goudy, deputy director of France's space centre in Toulouse, explained that more than 50 years after the start of the space age there is still no globally recognized arrangements for orbital tracks, as there are flight paths for aircraft. "The U.S. army and NASA have radars that can track satellites and the biggest debris, measuring more than 10 centimeters (four inches) across," he told Agence France-Presse.

"Some space agencies have access to the U.S. data and have set up a monitoring system to ensure that none of their satellites comes dangerously close to his debris." The latest incident "probably arose because of a lack of monitoring," Goudy suggested.

"Satellite operators are only now becoming aware of the problem of debris. Even if the U.S. data is available, not all of them have set up procedures to access them and act on them."