Breaking News: Two Satellites Collide In Orbit

reply to post by Zeptepi


Don't worry about it Zeptepi. Easy mistake to make. We still have the dynamic plot thanks to NGC

Thanks for checking anyway!

PS. If any mods see this perhaps they could edit Zeptepi's post?

reply to post by C.H.U.D.


If you go onto heavens-above.com and search for each satellite, click orbit, and you can copy the TLEs straight off the website at the bottom of the page.

Two unprecedented events within days. 1. Iran launch its first satellite 2. Two satellites crashes in orbit. Am I the only one finding this a bit too coincidental?


Could it be:

1: Iran targeting other satellites? Did they launch a satellite killer?

2: Someone targeting Iran's new satellite? An escuse for something to happen to it? "Oops, Iran's new satellite just got hit by debris from this 'accident'. What a shame"...


Does anyone know where Iran's satellite is at the moment?

reply to post by Hellmutt


i managed to find out some information regarding the rocket. seems like they worked with the russians in order to get the tech they needed to launch the thing from them. also it was a russian satelite that crashed in to the american. read the article, it was launched with a russian rocket. i put 100£ on that the iranian's crashed the american satelite, and got the codes for the old russian one from the russians.

BBC Middle East

From BBC:
It blasted off aboard a Russian Kosmos 3M rocket early on Thursday morning.

The satellite was built for Iran by Polyot, a Russian company based in the Siberian city of Omsk.

Director General of Iran Electronic Industries Ebrahim Mahmoudzadeh said Sina-1 was the result of years of research and 32 months of construction.

[edit on 12-2-2009 by Rufuz]

The Iridium sats can be repositioned from ground stations. I'd guess that the Russian sat was in a fixed orbit and not able to be altered.
If that is the case, it comes down to the same situation as a motor vehicle accident where a driver hits a parked car (or maybe a train would be a better analogy), so the Iridium would be at fault here.

Now the bigger question comes down to why the Iridium hit the Russian sat.

Was it a test? After all they have about 70 of these and replacements sitting in a standby orbit that can be repositioned when one goes out of service, so if they wanted to they could take down a lot of other sats.

Was it a hack? These sats are ground controlled, so it's possible someone hacked into the system and repointed the Iridium into the path of the Russian sat.

Or was it just 'user error'? Never underestimate the stupidity of the person behind the keyboard.

I remember when Iridium was going bankrupt and they were planning on splashing all the sats into the ocean until someone bought them out cheap. If these sats can be safely splashed into the ocean, they can certainly be splashed down on cities, and can also apparently be driven into other orbiting objects. Isn't it comforting to know that a private company owns a swarm of about 70 sats?

eb

reply to post by Razmear23


From what I'm hearing, the potential for collision was detected a few days ahead of time. It was not driven into another sat. They were supposed to pass within a few hundred meters but a collision was not the most likely scenario. Personally I trust a private company to handle its satellites responsibly much more than I trust the government; the ability to deorbit its fleet in a controlled fashion is a sign of that responsibility. Why would a company that already suffers the burden of high overhead costs waste a valuable satellite by ramming it into a piece of junk intentionally? Even if there are replacements, they just put their entire fleet at risk of debris collisions.

reply to post by ngchunter


Brilliant! Thanks NGC!


Don't know if anyone noticed, but there is a nice simulation (better than the you-tube link I embedded earlier) on spaceweather.com, that can be found here: link

According to this simulation the satellites collided at a combined speed of over 11.6 km/s, which is significantly more than the figures flying around earlier (a few hundreds of miles per hour).



[edit on 12-2-2009 by C.H.U.D.]

reply to post by Hellmutt


Omid is in a far lower orbit than the Iridium satellites, 246x377km vs about 760x790km.

reply to post by C.H.U.D.


Not really surprising given how radically different the orbital inclinations were. That's why a hit was anything but certain. Think about this, had either sat arrived at that exact point in space so much as a thousandth of a second late (orbital drag, very slightly off timing in tracking the satellite, etc), they would have probably missed each other.

[edit on 12-2-2009 by ngchunter]

reply to post by Zeptepi


Probably picked up by someone, although I did read back from the
last post:

The high security communications are used by the government.

No, these are not high security sats.

Thanks, but not what I meant.
Did any one guess what I meant.
How about providing high security communications.
Wouldn't that make them a high security sat to someone.
But, not to you.
I would like to know what is as high security sat.
I think comm to quite up on the scale of security as Nazis had
their secret messaging system.
The whole Iridium project should have been funded by the government
and just ripped off Bin Laden and other investors by the Carlye Group
perhaps.

Iridium provides encrypted communications for DOD and US
Government officials.
A government owned station in Hawaii was made for this purpose.
The LEO fleet are constantly in motion and the coverage loss circles
the globe until the slot is replaced.

How about that.
Thats the last word on Iridium and Globalstar comparisons that I recall.
Iridium did and Globalstar did not provide encryption the way the
government specified or the government did not like Globalstar.

reply to post by TeslaandLyne


The military has its own secured comm sat system, iridium suppliments them but is not completely vital. Taking out every iridium sat there is wouldn't eliminate their sat phone capability by a long shot, let alone one. Here's a good article on the history of real military comm sats:
www.aero.org...

Iridium company denies responsibility

The Maryland-based Iridium company denies responsibility for this week's collision between U.S. and Russian communication satellites.

The smashup of a commercial U.S. Iridium satellite and a disabled Russian craft came Tuesday about 500 miles over Siberia. Russian officials and experts say the crash has created speeding clouds of debris that threaten other unmanned spacecraft in nearby orbits.

Meanwhile, a Russian space expert wonders why U.S. satellite experts didn't prevent the crash by adjusting the working satellite's orbit. He speculates that was due to "computer failure
or a human error."

source

reply to post by ngchunter


Yeah. They were also reaching their peak velocities from the looks of it. The counter shows their relative velocity increasing all the way up until the instant before impact. Fascinating what you can learn from even a relatively simple simulation.

I wonder if this accident might itself be due to junk. A reasonable hit 24 (or more) hours before hand could alter the orbit enough to cause the collision in theory I suppose, and it follows that with more junk up there, orbits could start to become even less predictable.

Could we perhaps have put into motion something that we can't stop now?

A 'chain reaction' due to orbiting debris is not a new idea. Anyone happen to know what sort of density constitutes a 'critical mass'?

[edit on 12-2-2009 by C.H.U.D.]

Originally posted by ngchunter
reply to post by TeslaandLyne

 

The military has its own secured comm sat system, iridium suppliments them but is not completely vital. Taking out every iridium sat there is wouldn't eliminate their sat phone capability by a long shot, let alone one. Here's a good article on the history of real military comm sats:
www.aero.org...

Some times its not the military we have to worry about.
What if there was an inner 911 conspiracy that carried out orders
on Iridium secured phones.

The whole idea of non military secured communications by
the government via satellite phone seems even more ominous.

This is world wide secured communications for all parties involved
and makes conspiracy a piece of pie.

Why do the Russians want to knock out one LEO is probably just
practice as practice makes perfect.
Perhaps Russia does not like this secure system talking to
its citizens and causing trouble.
Its a clear message.

Just to expand on my previous above post:

But Igor Lisov, a prominent Russian space expert, said Thursday he did not understand why NASA's debris experts and Iridium had failed to prevent the collision, since the Iridium satellite was active and its orbit could be adjusted.

"It could have been a computer failure or a human error," he said. "It also could be that they only were paying attention to smaller debris and ignoring the defunct satellites."

Lisov said the debris may threaten a large number of earth-tracking and weather satellites in similar orbits.

"There is a quite a lot of satellites in nearby orbits," he told The Associated Press. "The other 65 Iridium satellites in similar orbits will face the most serious risk, and there numerous earth-tracking and weather satellites in nearby orbits. Fragments may trigger a chain of collisions."

source

From Russian News:

The Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos Thursday confirmed the collision and said that it poses no threat to the International Space Station (ISS). ....

The risk of damage from Tuesday's collision is greater for the Hubble Space Telescope and Earth-observing satellites, which are in higher orbit and nearer the debris field.....

Pang Zhihao, a Chinese space expert said Thursday that the debris of the collision may pose grave danger to other spacecrafts in case they hit them.

Russia News Net

Originally posted by TeslaandLyne
Some times its not the military we have to worry about.
What if there was an inner 911 conspiracy that carried out orders
on Iridium secured phones.

I don't worry about the military, my family is military, and I do not accept the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Even if I did accept it, you're begging the question. Furthermore, why would russia care 8 years after the fact?

The whole idea of non military secured communications by
the government via satellite phone seems even more ominous.

Is WPA ominous? It's non-military, but military officers use it on their personal machines. This is supplimentary to be able to interact with civilian comms, it's not their primary sat comm system.

This is world wide secured communications for all parties involved
and makes conspiracy a piece of pie.

Begging the question.

Why do the Russians want to knock out one LEO is probably just
practice as practice makes perfect.

No one has established that this was deliberate.

Perhaps Russia does not like this secure system talking to
its citizens and causing trouble.

What trouble? They also failed to knock out enough of the system to permanently or significantly disable it as far as we know.

[edit on 12-2-2009 by ngchunter]

Who needs te threat of meteors if you have tons of space junk RANDOMLY raining down on the earth.

Who knows how big they could be... or where they could hit....a school... a home.... bridges.... fuel lines.

Well i wanted to throw that out there, because im bored.

reply to post by Wertdagf


This debris is so high it won't be coming down for decades or more. The impact velocity was so high I would be surprised if anything left was big enough to reach the ground.

reply to post by ngchunter


What if it contianed materials effective at resisting heat? There are many advancements in materials that we are not priviy to.