ANU Astrophysicist and Cosmologist Dr Brad Tucker says the “second major collision from two objects in space” has been confirmed after pieces of a Chinese satellite which lost communication were found.
Dr Tucker said the first collision in space was in 2009 when an American and a Russian satellite crashed into one another and “produced 10,000 pieces of debris” and the second was this year as was confirmed by the United States Space Force.
“In March this year a Chinese satellite lost communication and there was a bit of a debate about what exactly happened,” he told Sky News Australia.
“After some mapping of some objects in that near orbit, they have now picked up multiple pieces, at least six of larger sized pieces of debris from that incident in March from essentially an old rocket booster from the Russians back in 1996.”
Dr Tucker said although this has only happened twice satellite collisions are “always a worry” as the Earth will have yet more debris in the atmosphere.
“This is always a worry because as we said there’s a lot of this stuff in space and once you collide, you just produce more bits of debris which float around and can crash into more things,” he said.