Ok, no one else is likely to find this as interesting as I did but it’s still worth sharing. The short version is that a commercial Iridium satellite (used for satellite phones and built in the building next door to where I’m currently sitting) collided with a defunct Russian communications relay satellite on Tuesday. The collision has already created over 600 trackable (greater than 3.9 in) pieces of debris which could endanger other satellites in low earth orbit.
This is completely unprecedented. U.S. STRATCOM routinely tracks about 18,000 ‘catalog objects’ in space and has only seen three accidental collisions before, each between a ‘moderate sized object’ and a ‘very small object.’ These satellites are considered large objects.
To give you a sense of scale here, I tried to come up with an example you could wrap your head around but still failed. Imagine two grains of sand orbiting a mile wide sphere. Now imagine those two grains of sand colliding. That’s the physical scale we’re talking.
