SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, @07:01PM
It is not space junk. It is an alien ship that instructed the earth vessel to change course or be fired upon.
The ESA is putting out this news so that when the alien ships annihilates the earth vessel, they can say we told you about the space junk.
And if there is any space junk out there, they cannot blame us for it: "we are responsible for leaving junk in earth's orbit, now pay us" etc, but they are going to try.