18 April 2020, Brandenburg, Sieversdorf: Two “Starlink” satellites can be seen as stripes of light … [+]
Over 2,000 Starlink broadband satellites have been launched to low-earth orbit by SpaceX in recent years. The constellation manages to avoid crashing into its own satellites and other spacecraft, but a more pressing concern may be smaller bits of debris.
Speaking at a small satellite conference in Utah over the weekend, one orbital data analyst said his company detected a “conjunction squall” impacting Starlink satellites on August 6.
A conjunction is space-speak for a potential collision, or at least a potential near miss that’s a little close for comfort. More simply put, some Starlink satellites had stumbled into the debris field from a November, 2021 Russian anti-satellite weapons demonstration in which the Kremlin destroyed its own defunct satellite, Cosmos 1408.
SpaceX automatically detects and adjusts for potential conjunctions. The company has said that it performed over 6,000 maneuvers to avoid collisions during a six-month period from December to May and that 1,700 of those moves were tied to the Russian debris field.
“If you didn’t have that automated system taking care of a spike like this, it could be really challenging to work it though,” Dan Oltrogge, chief scientist at space software company COMSPOC, told SpaceNews.
He adds that the threat to Starlink will decrease as the debris loses altitude, but that only shifts the threat elsewhere.
“It’s going to put (International Space Station) and others at risk.”
