If you’d be looking at the sky in Siberia around noon EST Tuesday, you might have seen two orbital satellites collide. The two  communications satellites collided Tuesday during an orbital accident according to NASA scientists.
The collision roughly 500 miles from Earth created a huge field of debris, but the risk to the International Space Station and its crew of three — 215 miles from Earth — is very low, said Nicholas Johnson of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. So is the risk to the next shuttle mission, he said. The launch is scheduled for as early as Feb. 22.
Debris from the satellites could pose a danger to a May mission to repair the Hubble telescope.
The collision was between a now-defunct Russian communications satellite launched in 1993 and one of 66 satellites privately owned by Iridium, a Maryland company that provides phone service to customers such as workers on offshore oil platforms. The company said in a statement that service interruptions should be minimal and fixed by Friday.
The collision “was dramatic, and it has significant consequences for the (space) environment,” Johnson said. “This was the worst such incident that’s ever occurred.”
The spacecraft collided over northern Siberia, where it was evening at the time. A “flash” would have been visible from the ground, Johnson said.
The hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of debris created by the collision could damage other working satellites, he said. Especially at risk are other Iridium satellites, which are “right there in the heart of the cloud.”
Although the U.S. military and others track orbital objects, there is no way to prevent them from running into each other. Such collisions are rare, however.
“Space is a big place. The odds are very small that something like this would happen,” Johnson said.
“There are no rules of the road in space,” he said. “Anyone can be anywhere they want to be.”
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