About 20 meters of space in Earth’s orbit saved the American NASA satellite TIMED from colliding with the inoperable Russian Cosmos-2221 spacecraft.
LeoLabs announced this on the social network X (formerly Twitter).
The company said that the collision between the two satellites almost occurred around 04:30 Kyiv time.
The LeoLabs equipment recorded that at the time of the closest satellite location, the distance between them was less than 20 meters.
Too close for comfort. 😳
At ~06:30 UTC today we observed a conjunction at 608 km between two non-maneuverable spacecraft: a derelict Russian satellite and an operational NASA satellite.
Miss distance = <20 meters
Probability of collision = 3 to 8% at TCA pic.twitter.com/4JWbYxwPh3– LeoLabs (@LeoLabs_Space) February 28, 2024
The company noted that the importance of this event lies in the fact that it is extremely rare in space. Over the past two years, there have been only 6 incidents where the distance between the objects that almost collided was less than 20 meters.
In the event of a collision between TIMED and Kosmos-2221 in low Earth orbit, debris could be generated that would pose a threat to constellations of satellites and manned spacecraft.
According to the LeoLabs analysis, the collision between the NASA vehicle and the Russian satellite could have resulted in 2-7 thousand pieces of debris.
