Almost crashing. The Dead Directors of Russia threaten NASA satellites in space: what happened

On February 28, the NASA satellite almost failed due to the close span of the non-working Russian spy satellite. The NASA spacecraft called Timed almost was a victim of the accident and could be destroyed as a result of a collision with the dead Russian Space Satellite "Space 2221". The latter flew about 20 m from the American satellite working in orbit, Space writes. In focus. Technology has appeared its Telegram channel.

Subscribe not to miss the latest and most intrusive news from the world of science! The NASA satellite called Timed since 2001 has been studying the influence of the sun and human activity on such layers of the Earth's atmosphere as the thermosphere, the ionosphere and the mesosphere. This region is a kind of gate between the Earth and the Space, where solar energy first enters the environment of our planet.

It was he who could be destroyed by the non-working Russian spacecraft "Space 2221", which in NASA is called a spy satellite. This 2-ton satellite was launched into orbit in 1992, and now it is one of the representatives of numerous space debris. As it became known from NASA message, on February 28, two devices were very close to each other. This happened because the dead Russian satellite flew a dangerous distance to the NASA operating apparatus, which could lead to the destruction of the latter.

According to NASA data, such rapprochements would still occur, but it was the nearest distance at which the satellites were. The American Space Agency did not report which distance divided two satellites. But the data of the LEOLABS satellite tracking in orbit showed that the two devices that were at an altitude of 608 km were almost faced when they were divided only 20 meters. Such dangerous rapprochement of dead apparatus with working satellites in orbit is becoming more and more frequent.

Currently, about 11. 5 thousand satellites rotate around the Earth, and only 9,000 of them are in working order. But this is not the whole problem. Around our planet, approximately 36. 5 thousand space debris is rotated with a width of 10 cm. And fragments of 1 mm wide rotate even more - about 130 million. Even such very small debris can significantly damage the satellites, as they fly at high speed.

For example, at an altitude of 400 km, where the International Space Station (ISS) is located, the fragments of space debris fly at a speed of about 28,000 km/h. The focus has already wrote that Roscosmos confirmed the existence of air leakage in the Russian module "Star" at the ISS. The Russians claim that this problem is not critical and does not affect the work of the orbital station, and does not pose a threat to the lives of astronauts.