Close call as two satellites barely miss colliding
THE FIRST ALERT came on January 27. Two small satellites, whirling through Earth’s low orbits, had “the potential for a conjunction.”
Those are the words Major Cody Chiles, spokesperson for the Joint Force Space Component Command, uses to mean “the chance of a collision.” The satellites, one from a company called Capella Space and the other from Spire Global, could smack into each other.
If the satellites were to collide, shards of satellite (years of work, some dollar signs) would shoot out, lost, into space. They would turn into yet more bits feeding the already significant swirl of space debris imperiling other orbiters.
