On February 10, 2009, two military operated satellites, Iridium 33 and Russian military Kosmos-2251, collided at a speed of 11,700 m/s (26,000 mph; 42,000 km/h) and an altitude of 789 kilometres (490 mi) above the Taymyr Peninsula in the Siberian Russian Arctic. It was the first time a hypervelocity collision occurred between two satellites.
The US military had been alerted by Iridium Satellite LLC to the sudden “non-reporting” of the destroyed craft, according to Cartwright, who from 2004 to 2007 headed the Pentagon’s Strategic Command responsible for space operations.[1]
Kosmos-2251 was a 950-kilogram (2,100 lb) Russian Strela military communications satellite owned by the Russian Space Forces.[2] It had no propulsion system.[3]
Iridium company
Up until 2009, Iridium Satellite LLC ran a network that used 66 satellites to provide voice and data services for areas not served by ground-based communications networks.[1] In 2010, the company became incorporated as Iridium Communications.
Retired U.S. Air Force General John Campbell is Iridium’s executive vice president for US government programs. Iridium had been receiving a weekly average of 400 conjunction reports from the U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Space Operations Center that tracks debris in space.[1]
In June 2007, John Campbell stood before a Washington research panel, hosted by the George C. Marshall Institute, explaining a vulnerability to the panel about how his company handles conjunction reports.[1]
Campbell explained that conjunction reports are issued every time a potential threat object passes within five kilometers (3 miles) of a commercial satellite, “the ability to actually do anything with all the information is pretty limited,” Campbell continued, “Even if we had a report of an impending direct collision, the error would be such that we might maneuver into a collision as well as move away from one.”[1]
However, Campbell attempted to reassure the Washington panel that space is so vast that the chances of a collision are infinitesimal, based on the so-called “Big Sky” theory. Reuters scoffs at the remark, noting that there are more than 18,000 pieces of orbiting junk big enough to track.[1]
Iridium company response
On 12 February, 2009, Iridium Satellite LLC said that it had no advance warning of an impending collision between Iridium 33 and the Russian military satellite above Siberia. The company rejected suggestions that it might have come to disregard “conjunction reports” — potential accident alerts — routinely relayed by the U.S. military.[1]
“Iridium didn’t have information prior to the collision to know that the collision would occur,” said Liz DeCastro, a company spokeswoman. “If the organizations that monitor space had that information available, we are confident they would have shared it with us.”[1]
Aftermath
Marine Corps General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former head of the command that runs U.S. military space operations, said countries with satellites in space will have to play “dodgeball” for decades to avoid debris from the collision.[1]
Anti-satellite
China added significantly to space debris when it used a ground-based ballistic missile to blow apart an obsolete weather satellite in a January 2007 arms test.[1]
China’s anti-satellite test “alone increased our risk due to space junk by a factor of about three and increased the overall risk of collision by about 15 percent,” John Campbell told the Washington Panel in 2007.[1]
The United States used a missile from a Navy warship to explode a tank of toxic fuel on a crippled U.S. spy satellite in February 2008.[1]