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September 3, 2010 | A satellite traffic cop to prevent space collisions | Washington: Although space collisions are rare, when they do happen, they leave a long-lasting impact. A coalition of satellite traffic cops, however, aims to prevent these episodes from occurring at all. Tobias Nassif is the vice president of satellite operations and engineering for Intelsat and a director of the newly formed Space Data Association. The group provides advance notice of potential
collisions so satellite operators can reposition their spacecraft before it's
too late. As more and more spacecraft are put into orbit, the chance of a collision
increases as well, he added. The prospect of an orbital crash seemed pretty remote
until Feb. 10, 2009, when an obsolete Soviet-era satellite called Cosmos 2251
ploughed into a working commercial telecommunications satellite owned by Iridium.
It generated more than 1,700 pieces of debris that were large enough to be tracked
by radars on Earth. Ninety-six percent of the junk remains in orbit today. "Just
having the contact information among the operators might help mitigate the
possibilities
of collisions in space," Discovery News quoted Nassif as saying. The group expects
to be fully operationally by January, issuing not just warnings of potential collisions,
but also ways to mitigate radio interference. "The system really isn't limited
in the number of spacecraft that it can handle. We're outreaching to all the operators
and civil agencies," Nassif said. |
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