So what are the odds of that happening accidentally?
That’s why I asked the question. But if the Iridium controllers still had control of their craft up until the impact, and they new the encounter would be close, then they could have maneuvered the satellite to a different orbit until the cosmos went by.
Since they are going to shift a spare into position, the satellites in the system clearly has sufficient orbital change capability to get out of the way of a wayward object if it’s known in advance that it’s going to come close.
Someone in the observation community dropped the ball on this one.
The rumors on one of the tech news aggregators was that the Rusians deliberately sabotaged the Iridium satellite that was in the process of transferring voice files to “official” circles in the US.
Iridium, after the collapse of its mobile technology and defeat by GSM, was bailed out by the Feds and increasinly does a lot of its work for the US Govt.
Given that it can happen, I share your pessimism that it did happen accidentally, especially in consideration of Russia's new belligerence and their use of cyber attacks against Georgia.
It's getting very crowded up there. Here's a graphic that shows just how crowded.
http://www.thetech.org/exhibits/online/satellite/4/4a/4a.1.html
Space Command publishes all known close approaches of unclassified payloads of any kind by any user and all known unclassified objects about a week in advance. (Debris/debris close approaches are ignored.) This gives operators of payloads an opportunity to maneuver to a safer orbit. These predictions are predicated on the assumption that the cataloged objects do not maneuver.
Iridium is a marginally economical operation, living off a Pentagon subsidy in exchange for affording the U.S. military additional capacity. Since Iridium can maneuver, it's failure to do so indicates that the operators did not anticipate any hazard.
Given that the Iridium had a small, but not zero value, to the U.S. military and the “defunct” satellite was Russian, the circumstances are suspect. It should be possible to scrub observations of both vehicles to see if they are even remotely consistent with the hypothesis of an accidental collision. I'll take a wait and see attitude on that.
One cannot completely dismiss the possibility that the defunct Russian vehicle impacted a cataloged or uncataloged debris sometime after the last published predictions and was nudged into the Iridium, but I, for one, see this as very, very unlikely. In the “OJ was framed by racist cops” level of plausibility.