By Guy Faulconbridge
Space officials in Russia and the United States are tracking hundreds of pieces of debris that were spewed into space after a US satellite collided with a defunct Russian military satellite.
The crash, which Russian officials said took place on Tuesday above northern Siberia, is the first publicly known satellite collision and has raised concerns about the safety of the manned International Space Station.
The collision happened in an orbit frequently used by satellites and other spacecraft. The US Strategic Command, the arm of the Pentagon that handles space, said countries might have to manoeuvre their craft to avoid the debris.
"The collision of these two space apparatuses happened by chance and the two apparatuses have been destroyed," said Major-General Alexander Yakushin, first deputy commander of Russia's Space Forces.
"The fragments pose no danger whatsoever to Russian space objects," he said.
When asked if the debris posed a danger to other nations' spacecraft, he said: "As for foreign ones, it is not for me to say as it is not in my competency."
The collision between the Iridium Satellite LLC-operated satellite and the Russian Cosmos-2251 military satellite occurred about 780km above the Russian Arctic.
That is an altitude used by satellites that monitor weather, relay communications and perform scientific observations.
"It's a very important orbit for a lot of satellites," said Air Force Colonel Les Kodlick from the US Strategic Command. "We believe it's the first time that two satellites have collided in orbit."
The US Joint Space Operations Centre was tracking 500 to 600 new pieces of debris, some as small as 10cm in diameter, in addition to the 18 000 or so other man-made objects it previously catalogued in space, he said.
Russian Space Forces said it was monitoring debris that was spread over altitudes of between 500km and 1 300km above Earth.
The priority is guarding the International Space Station, which orbits at 350km, substantially below the collision altitude. One Russian and two US astronauts are currently aboard the station.
The orbit of the space station can be changed by controllers from Earth, but even a tiny piece of debris can cause significant damage to the space station as it travels at 8km per second.
"If there is any threat to the International Space Station then there will be an announcement," one Russian space official said. Another said there was little immediate threat to the station.
The crash has underlined concerns about how crowded the orbit paths around the planet have become in recent decades.
But experts said the chances of such a collision were extremely low and added that leading space powers had been racing to develop new ways to destroy orbiting objects.
"The orbital altitude where the collision took place is among the most crowded in low-Earth orbit," Texas-based security consultancy Stratfor said in a research note.
"But statistically speaking, the enormous scale of space makes the chance that this kind of direct collision would occur completely by accident infinitesimal," it said.
The collision occurred in a polar orbit not far from that of a defunct Chinese weather satellite shot apart by a ground-based ballistic missile in a Chinese weapons test last year.
The European Union said leading nations should adopt a code of conduct for civil and military activities in space. - Reuters