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US Strategic Command is still cataloguing debris from the Feb. 10th satellite collision over northern Siberia. "The count is now at 109 catalogued fragments for Iridium 33 and 245 for Kosmos 2251," says satellite observer Daniel Deak, who has prepared some 3D maps of the debris for readers of spaceweather.com. Click on the image to view a snapshot of Kosmos fragments on Feb 26th: (see the provided spaceweather.com link) A similar image shows Iridium 33 debris, and other views are available, too: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5. (see the provided spaceweather.com link) These maps reveal in full what earlier, less...

Space weapons are dangerous – but out-of-control, defunct satellites can do just as much damage, if not more. So says a leading space scientist who has calculated that Tuesday's collision between an Iridium communications satellite and the defunct Soviet-era Cosmos 2251 spacecraft expended a great deal more destructive energy than China's infamous anti-satellite missile test did in January 2007. In 2003, space debris expert Hugh Lewis and colleagues at the University of Southampton in the UK ran predictions on the debris field that would be created in a hypothetical Iridium satellite break-up owing to a collision with just 1 kilogram...

WASHINGTON - Iridium Satellite LLC confirmed today that one of its satellites was destroyed Tuesday in an unprecedented collision with a spent Russian satellite and that the incident could result in limited disruptions of service. According to an e-mail alert issued by NASA today, Russia's Cosmos 2251 satellite slammed into the Iridium craft at 11:55 a.m. EST (0455 GMT) over Siberia at an altitude of 490 miles (790 km). The incident was observed by the U.S. Defense Department's Space Surveillance Network, which later was tracking two large clouds of debris. "This is the first time we've ever had two intact...