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04 Nov 2009

Comments:1

Space is Crowded: Pentagon Eyes 1,300 Potential Satellite Collisions

Added by USGIF Category: Daily Intelligence Brief, General

SpaceisCrowdedOur readers may recall back in February we did a post about how space is becoming an ever crowded place — based on the news that the Air Force tracks more than 18,000 objects in our orbit. In addition, around that time, an Iridium communications satellite collided with a Russian military satellite, underscoring just how crowded it is up there. Well, the latest news is that the U.S. military is now tracking 800 maneuverable satellites on a daily basis for possible collisions and expects to add 500 more non-maneuvering satellites by year’s end. Read the full Reuters story here.

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1 Comments »

  1. Adam Gorski wrote: 5 November 2009

    This seems like a gross under-estimate. The free SOCRATES project based on AGI’s STK Conjunction Analysis Tool computes over 3,000 primary satellites against nearly 14,000 other objects twice a day already! The latest run predicted over 15,000 close approaches (or conjunctions) in the next 7 days. Please see for yourself: http://www.celestrak.com/SOCRATES/

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