Russian spacecraft yards from Nasa satellite collision

A RUSSIAN spacecraft was just a few yards from hitting a Nasa satellite in a “shocking” near-miss that could have put lives at risk, the US space agency has claimed.

Pam Melroy, the deputy administrator of Nasa, said experts had been “really scared” by the incident on Feb 28 because it was not possible to manoeuvre either satellite.

The narrow escape happened when the defunct Russian spy satellite Cosmos 2221 drifted uncomfortably close to Nasa’s Timed (Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics) satellite, which monitors Earth’s atmosphere.

Col Melroy, a former astronaut, said that if the satellites had collided it would have led to thousands of bullet-fast pieces of debris shooting around Earth and warned the problem was “monumental”.

At the Space Foundation’s Space Symposium in Colorado, she said: “It was very shocking for all of us at Nasa. On February 28 a Nasa spacecraft called Timed and a Russian satellite, neither of them manoeuvrable, were expected to make a close path. We recently learnt that the path ended up being less than 10 metres apart, less than the distance of me to the front row. Had the two satel- lites collided we would have seen debris generation, tiny shards travelling at 10,000 miles per hour, waiting to puncture a hole in another spacecraft and potentially putting human lives at risk.”

“It’s kind of sobering to think that something that’s the size of the eraser on the end of your pencil could wreak such havoc – but it can. We’re all worried about this. Timed really scared us.”

On Tuesday, Nasa launched its Space Sustainability Strategy which aims to better map and monitor satellites and debris, and keep orbits as clear as possible.

There are currently more than 10,000 satellites orbiting the Earth – a four-fold increase since 2019 – and numbers are set to grow exponentially.

Some 400,000 satellites have been approved globally for low Earth orbit, with Spacex alone poised to launch another 44,000 for its Starlink internet constellation.

Experts have predicted that once all the planned internet constellations are operational, there will be about 16,000 decaying satellites at any one time that will need to come out of orbit.

Not only are the dead satellites clogging up valuable orbit space but they also risk setting off a major disaster.