‘Very high risk’ dead Soviet satellite, Chinese rocket body will collide in space

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 metres (39 feet).

That proximity led LeoLabs to calculate a 10 per cent chance that the objects will collide at 8:56pm Eastern Time Thursday (8:56am Friday Hong Kong time). If they do, the explosion would send bits of debris rocketing in all directions.

A 10 per cent chance may seem low, but Nasa routinely moves the International Space Station when the orbiting laboratory faces just a 0.001 per cent (1-in-100,000) chance or greater of colliding with an object.

Since the Soviet satellite and Chinese rocket body are both defunct, nobody can move them out of each other’s way. The odds of a crash will likely change as they approach each other, though LeoLabs expects the risk to stay high.

A collision would probably not pose a danger to anybody on Earth, since the satellites are 991km (616 miles) above the ground and are set to cross paths above Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. But the debris the crash would create could cause major problems in space.

“If this turns into a collision, it’s probably thousands to tens of thousands of new pieces of debris that is going to cause a headache for any satellite that’s going out into upper low-Earth orbit, or even beyond,” Dan Ceperley, the CEO of LeoLabs, told Business Insider. “It’s maybe a much bigger problem than a lot of people realise.”