Posted on 08/17/2021 7:36:03 AM PDT by BenLurkin
In March, the U.S. Space Force's 18th Space Control Squadron (18SPCS) reported the breakup of Yunhai 1-02, a Chinese military satellite that launched in September 2019. It was unclear at the time whether the spacecraft had suffered some sort of failure — an explosion in its propulsion system, perhaps — or if it had collided with something in orbit.
On Saturday (Aug. 14), McDowell spotted an update in the Space-Track.org catalog, which the 18SPCS makes available to registered users. The update included "a note for object 48078, 1996-051Q: 'Collided with satellite.' This is a new kind of comment entry — haven't seen such a comment for any other satellites before," McDowell tweeted on Saturday.
He dove into the tracking data to learn more. McDowell found that Object 48078 is a small piece of space junk — likely a piece of debris between 4 inches and 20 inches wide (10 to 50 centimeters) — from the Zenit-2 rocket that launched Russia's Tselina-2 spy satellite in September 1996. Eight pieces of debris originating from that rocket have been tracked over the years, he said, but Object 48078 has just a single set of orbital data, which was collected in March of this year.
"I conclude that they probably only spotted it in the data after it collided with something, and that's why there's only one set of orbital data. So the collision probably happened shortly after the epoch of the orbit. What did it hit?" McDowell wrote in another Saturday tweet.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
Collisions are bad.
They say that a hunk of junk kind of whacked a Chinese satellite. I bet there might be more to it.
It may be a message from Russia. “You guys remember when China blasted a satellite from the ground to tell us how tough they are? We can do it space-to-space.”
We have no one to blame but ourselves; some more than others. China's stupid 'technology demonstration' back in 2007 sure didn't help, although the U.S. did something similar back in the mid 80s.
Makes you wonder what they're thinking. Or if there's any 'thinking' even involved.
Yeah I’m sure it was just an accident....is outter space a “no fault” state.
Layman’s question: Do all launches into space, and the satellites thereof, orbit in the same general direction?
Holy head-on collisions, Batman; that’s a good question.
No, all satellites do not orbit in the same direction. It depends what the purpose of the satellite is. Some, typically communition sattelites, “hover” over a spot on the ground....that is, the orbit is in the planets orbital direction, far enough out and fast enough to stay there. That is called a synchronous orbit.
Others have what is known as a polar orbit, where the pass over the polar region, likely at enough of an angle that they criss-cross around the globe, covering the whole earth in a few days or weeks.
Ohers yet have an orbit skewed to the equator, say by 45 deg.
Waiting on the first ‘astronut’ to get whacked by all the debris. A paint particle traveling at speed would make a big hole.
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