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A European Space Agency satellite risks colliding with a piece of space debris about 15 centimeters (a half-foot) long this week, forcing ESA's flight control to plan a rare evasive maneuver.
A piece of an old Russian satellite called Cosmos-375 is forecast to miss Swarm-B, one of ESA's three Swarm satellites that measure Earth's magnetic fields, by just over the length of a football field. But the margin of error for that forecast is around 1,000 meters (3,280 feet or more like three football fields).
ESA has been working with data from the US armed forces' Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC), located at Vandenberg Air Force base in California, to plan a collision avoidance maneuver that would be uploaded to the satellite Wednesday.
If the satellite is able to alter its orbit as planned, the piece of junk should pass 746 meters (2,448 feet) in front of Swarm-B and 56 meters (184 feet) below it.
Pretty interesting that they are able to track a 15cm piece of debris.
Source:
https://www.cnet.com/news/european-space-agency-orbiter-russian-satellite-space-junk-this-week/
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:57PM
So if I have a Gaussian curve with a mean of 10, but a standard deviation of 100, how am I supposed to describe that function? Am I no longer allowed to tell you it has a mean of 10 in your maths, or do I have to say it has a mean of zero because that is the digit in the third position?
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday January 26 2017, @11:42PM
So if I have a Gaussian curve with a mean of 10, but a standard deviation of 100
Standard deviation != margin of error.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @11:17PM
In technical fields it is used that way (at least 90 +/- 7% of the time). Your margin of error is typically expressed in standard deviations (3-sigma, 5-sigma, etc.), so this thing should pass 746 meters +/- 500 meters in front (or whatever the hell the numbers are; the summary is confusing).