Tuesday February 10th saw the accidental collision of an operational, and privately owned communications satellite (Iridium 33) and an old, unused Russian satellite (Cosmos-2251). Celestrak are now providing tracking data for the debris of this collision and I have patched it through to Google Earth using my Satellite KML code. You can download the Google Earth file here to follow events in real time.
The crash, which happened over 400 miles above Siberia, destroyed the derelict Russian satellite and one of the 66 objects that make up the Iridium mesh, or constellation. The constellation provides voice and data connections for satellite phones as well as other services. It has around 300,000 clients across the globe, including the US Department of Defense and scientists at the South Pole. Iridium services have now been restored and company was in fact prepared for this scenario, even if they were not expecting it.
You can see from these screenshots, taken this morning, that the two sets of debris (Iridium in white, Russian in red) are still more-or-less following their original orbits. Celestrak is providing data for the radar-trackable particles, and smaller fragments do not show up here. The pieces of debris have begun to drift apart and will eventually begin to spread out and move more eccentrically as the weeks go by.
I had been meaning to organise my ‘Satellites on Google Earth‘ code, and have been prompted by these events to create a summary page which you can find linked at the top of the page or by clicking here.
Thanks for the wonderful graphics. Will all this debris eventually burn up in the atmosphere? How long will that take?
Whether or not the debris will re-enter and burn up is unknown. If these debris are in stable orbits they may continue to follow the trajectories of their parent satellites for many, many years. However the nature of the fragments is uncertain. If they are spinning very quickly or have irregular shapes, they may yet move or collide again with smaller pieces. The worry is that they will pass close to the ISS or other important objects. The ISS orbits quite close to the Earth at low altitudes and these higher-orbit fragments would have to pass across that altitude to re-enter.
Orbiting Frog is very cool: he has software that allows you to track the debris from the recent satellite collision using Google….
Hi, I am new to all of this and don’t really understand what I can do to see satellite trajectories on google earth – though I tried to follow the link for both the ISS and also the recent satellite crash.
Tonight at 11.05 in Edinburgh, I saw what I think was the ISS passing across the sky at satellite speed – it was really big. Didn’t have time to set up the camera. And I would really like to try to take a photograph on its next orbit.
I enjoyed finding your site, it is very informative and will look in again – especially if I can get myself set up to follow events worth looking out for. Thankyou.
The problem you’ll have is that you won’t see the ISS every time it goes over your location. This is because the visibility of the ISS (or any satellite) depends on reflection of light by the Sun, which in turn depends on the angle and position of the satellite in the sky from your location.
To predict when you will next see the ISS from your location I would suggest following the @overedinburgh Twitter feed (if you are on Twitter), using my LookUp iPhone webapp for spotting satellites, or using the Heaven’s Above website which can give you detailed predictions including the tracks of the satellites in the night sky.
Very interesting! Amazing to a novice.