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One of China’s Long March 6A rockets has disintegrated in low Earth orbit, creating a debris cloud of hundreds of pieces, according to space debris monitoring organizations.
The rocket launched from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center on Tuesday carried 18 G60 satellites into orbit, marking only the first deployment for Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology Group’s Thousand Sails constellation.
The megaconstellation of satellites will eventually reach 1,296 satellites, with plans to increase capacity to around 14,000 to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.
Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. The U.S. Space Command, a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense, confirmed Thursday that the rocket had disintegrated.
According to a spokesperson for U.S. Space Command, “USSPACECOM has not observed any immediate threats and continues to conduct routine unification assessments to support the security and sustainability of the space domain.”
U.S. Space Command continues to monitor the debris and provide information to NASA.
“There was no immediate threat to the International Space Station as a result of this disruption,” said Rob Margetta, Public Affairs Officer at NASA Headquarters.
The amount of debris tracked on Thursday changed hourly, starting with more than 50 pieces tracked by Slingshot Aerospace’s Global Sensor Network. Later, U.S. Space Command said it was tracking more than 300 pieces.
Radar data from monitoring agency LeoLabs confirmed that at least 700 pieces of debris were generated in the incident, and possibly more than 900.
‘A significant danger’
The rocket is thought to have broken up at an altitude of 810 kilometers (503 miles) above the Earth’s surface, with the fragments posing “a significant hazard to (low Earth orbit) constellations” below an altitude of 800 kilometers (497 miles), according to Slingshot.
For example, the International Space Station orbits approximately 408 kilometers (254 miles) above Earth.
Slingshot’s Horus sensor systems, which provide satellite tracking in low Earth orbit, “detected a series of bright, unexpected objects moving on the same orbital path as the rocket body and the G60 satellites it deployed.”
The true risks of the debris cloud won’t be known until experts have a chance to fully analyze it, which could take a day or two. And the reason the rocket broke apart is still unknown.
Because the Chinese satellites are placed in orbit around Earth’s poles rather than in an equatorial orbit, they “will have a real impact on other objects that are not in polar orbit, like two cars colliding at an intersection,” said John L. Crassidis, the Moog Professor of Innovation in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University at Buffalo.
Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 27,300 kilometers per hour, Crassidis said.
“The worst-case scenario is any piece of the debris field hitting something moving around the equator,” he said. “That’s a T-bone intersection situation. Imagine two cars going 17,000 MPH and colliding at a T-bone intersection. Obviously, that’s bad. In general, any object in its path is still going to be a bad situation.”
Future space debris risks
Given the altitude at which the fragmentation occurred, the debris would likely remain there for several years, some even decades, but it was difficult to predict how long without knowing the shape of the debris, Crassidis said.
According to Victoria Heath, LeoLabs’ VP of Marketing and Communications, this is the second time a rocket body has experienced a significant disintegration event in low Earth orbit.
According to LeoLabs, on November 12, 2022, another body of the Long March 6A rocket exploded in the low Earth orbit region where satellites are concentrated, and the resulting more than 500 pieces of debris were scattered between 320 and 1,500 kilometers (198 miles to 932 miles), increasing the risk of collision with satellites, especially in the center of the debris cloud.
The company concluded in its analysis that the November 2022 incident was caused by a problem with the spacecraft’s propulsion system, rather than the rocket breaking apart as a result of a collision with another object.
According to LeoLabs, there are approximately 1,000 abandoned rocket bodies in low Earth orbit today, and that number continues to grow due to an increase in launches as more countries focus on space goals.
“Even a fraction of the launches required to field this Chinese mega-constellation would produce as much debris as this first launch, and the result would be a significant addition to the space debris population in (low Earth orbit),” Audrey Schaffer, vice president of strategy and policy at Slingshot Aerospace, said in a statement.
“Such events highlight the importance of adhering to existing space debris reduction guidelines to reduce the generation of new space debris and underscore the need for robust space domain awareness capabilities to rapidly detect, track and catalog newly launched space objects so they can be scanned for potential mergers.”
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