Kaputnik Chaos Could Kill Hubble

摘要

A cloud of debris spreading through low Earth orbit following the collision of two satellites poses a new risk to many scientific missions and may signal the demise of the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA is monitoring the increased threat carefully, and if it is as bad as some fear, the agency may have to cancel the proposed shuttle-servicing mission slated for later this year. Without that mission, the telescope's days are numbered, even if none of the new debris comes anywhere close to it.rnAt 04:56 gmt on 10 February an active communications satellite owned by Iridium Satellite of Bethesda, Maryland, and a defunct Russian military-communications satellite collided some 800 kilometres above Siberia at more than 10 kilometres per second. The cloud of debris initially consisted of 600 objects large enough to be tracked by the US space-surveillance network, and experts expect that number to grow to more than 1,000 within the coming weeks. Simulations suggest there will be millions more pieces too small to track.