Starlink and the Chinese satellite almost collided last week

A collision in space was narrowly avoided last week when a newly deployed Chinese satellite came within a few hundred meters of one of the 9,000 Starlink satellites currently operating in low Earth orbit. SpaceX blames the satellite operator for not sharing location data.

“When satellite operators do not share the ephemeris of their satellites, dangerous close proximity can occur in space.” Written by Michael NicholsVice President of Starlink Engineering. “A few days ago, 9 satellites were deployed from a launch from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China. To our knowledge, no coordination or conflict was made with existing satellites operating in space, resulting in a 200-meter proximity between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at an altitude of 560 kilometers.”

Starlink satellites have the ability to automatically adjust course to avoid objects in their path. However, these things must be known for the avoidance system to work. In the first six months of 2025, the Starlink spacecraft will perform its mission More than 144,000 such maneuvers.

“Our team is currently in contact for further details. All CAS space launches determine their launch windows using the Ground-Based Space Awareness System to avoid collisions with known satellites/debris. This is a mandatory procedure.”

And apparently the commercial space launch company, based in Guangzhou, China, was Avoid blamingBy saying that the accident “occurred approximately 48 hours after payload separation, by which time the launch mission had long since ended.”

More than 24,000 objects, including satellites and debris, are currently being tracked in low Earth orbit, an increase of 76 percent since 2019, according to the publication. space. By the end of this decade, there may be as many as 70,000 satellites operating in the same region, most of them in outer space service. Satellite Internet constellations It has been launched by private and government organizations in the United States, China and Europe.