Space collision - dead Soviet satellite and a discarded Chinese rocket body

[calendria]

 

 

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/a-dead-soviet-satellite-and-a-discarded-chinese-rocket-body-have-a-1-in-10-chance-of-colliding-in-space-on-thursday/ar-BB1a1YDT?li=BBnb7Kz

Both objects are dead and can't be maneuvered soooooo ...

A dead Soviet satellite and a discarded Chinese rocket body are speeding toward each other in space and could crash catastrophically on Thursday.

LeoLabs, a company that uses radar to track satellites and debris in space, said on Tuesday night that it was monitoring a "very high-risk" conjunction — an intersection in the two objects' orbits around Earth. A series of observations since Friday have shown that the two large pieces of space junk could miss each other by just 12 meters (39 feet)

[teresa3200]

That's really interesting!

[pectacon]

Oh that is interesting. I didn't realize we had so much litter floating around in space. I was hoping to find out if this is something that might be visible, probably won't be an explosion or anything.

[calendria]

Oh that is interesting. I didn't realize we had so much litter floating around in space. I was hoping to find out if this is something that might be visible, probably won't be an explosion or anything.

space junk will miss each other by 8 to 43 meters (26 to 141 feet) at 8:56 p.m. ET on Thursday
Since the Soviet satellite and Chinese rocket body are both defunct, nobody can move them out of each other's way. If they do collide, an explosion roughly equivalent to detonating 14 metric tons of TNT will send bits of debris rocketing in all directions, according to astronomer Jonathan McDowell..
A collision would probably not pose a danger to anybody on Earth, since the satellites are 991 kilometers (616 miles) above the ground and are set to cross paths above Antarctica's Weddell Sea.

[Work2hard]

wow

[singletonb]

AS if 2020 has not been bad enough, now this!!!!!

[jkhanson]

Hurray!  These two space debris crafts missed each other last night, Thursday, October 15

Some blurbs from the report I read say:

"Bullet dodged," McDowell said on Twitter. "But space debris is still a big problem." 
Space collisions make clouds of dangerous high-speed debris
Nearly 130 million bits of space junk currently surround Earth, from abandoned satellites, spacecraft that broke apart, and other missions. That debris travels at roughly 10 times the speed of a bullet, which is fast enough to inflict disastrous damage to vital equipment, no matter how small the pieces.

A debris disaster could cut off our access to space
If the space-junk problem were to get extreme, a chain of collisions could spiral out of control and surround Earth in an impassable field of debris. This possibility is known as a Kessler event, after Donald J. Kessler, who worked for NASA's Johnson Space Center and calculated in a 1978 paper that it could take hundreds of years for such debris to clear up enough to make spaceflight safe again.

[pectacon]

Glad to hear it! I was trying to find some kind of live telescope broadcast to keep an eye on it but I guess I didn't miss anything.