Something odd has happened to NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS).

Back in November, four pieces from the UARS were cataloged by the U.S. Air Force Space Command. What caused the litter from the spacecraft appears to be the result from a single event - perhaps a collision with another space object.

The shuttle-deployed UARS has been circling Earth since 1991. The large spacecraft had served up important Earth climate data prior to its deactivation in late 2005.

But on November 10, UARS experienced some kind of event that produced the debris.

T.S. Kelso runs the CelesTrak web site and is an orbital debris analyst and technical program manager at the Center for Space Standards & Innovation in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

In running back the pieces back to UARS on November 10, he noticed that a piece of debris from Russia’s Cosmos 1275 “was near enough to be considered a suspect for a collision. It intersected the orbit several minutes before the apparent separation point,” Kelso told me.

However, there is a fair amount of error in the positions of these objects - so they do not appear to line up precisely, Kelso added.

By the way, space junk from Cosmos 1275 was produced when that former Soviet Union navigation satellite was blown into fragments back in 1981, perhaps by a chunk of human-made debris - at least that was the speculation in Western circles. However, according to official Russian sources the cause of the breakup of Cosmos 1275 was a battery malfunction.

That cause is consistent with the debris pattern and the fact that the spacecraft broke up after less than two months in space. NASA breakup records have noted this cause for many years.

For Kelso, he thinks collisions in space might be more prevalent than thought.

“Of course, we keep hearing that there have only been three recorded collisions, but the process of detecting them and then doing the analysis can take months or years…as seen already in this case,” Kelso said.

“Sooner or later, we’re going to stop assuming that because we don’t notice collisions doesn’t mean they aren’t happening. At least this satellite was decommissioned before this happened,” Kelso concluded.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 11:53 am and is filed under Environment, Space & Astronomy, Technology, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.