What's that up in the sky, is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's just a satellite; heads up!
On February 11th,Russian and U.S. space satellites collided over northern Siberia at an altitude of 491 miles. The collision caused a cloud of wreckage, which put the estimates at around 600 pieces of debris. The Russian satellite was Cosmos 2251, a communications relay station that was believed to be non-operational for approximately the past 10 years. The U.S. satellite was a commercial Iridium communications satellite.
Analysts are saying that the debris can spread into many directions because of the colliding force. I for one would be sweating a little bit if I were in the NASA space station right about now. There were also reports in Texas that saying there was supposedly debris from the collision falling over the state.
Nothing to this extent has happened before, so it'll be interesting to see what kind of problems this collision might cause down the road to all the other satellites in space – which totals around 18,000 objects.
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