Two Satellites could collide in Earth Orbit | Dead Satellites Collide in Space This Week

While it’s not written in the stars, two out-of-use space satellites may collide Wednesday evening.

LeoLabs, Inc., a space debris tracking service, announced on Twitter Monday that it was monitoring a possible collision between two satellites — IRAS (13777) and GGSE-4 (2828).

There's a lot of stuff up there, whizzing around in low-Earth orbit. Given the thousands of old, defunct satellites that can no longer communicate with Earth, it's surprising how seldom they collide; but just such a collision might happen this week.

According to space debris tracking service LeoLabs, IRAS (a decommissioned space telescope launched in 1983) and GGSE-4 (a science payload aboard a decommissioned and only relatively recently declassified military satellite launched in 1967) are headed for a close encounter.

According to LeoLabs' data, on January 29, at 23:39:35 UTC, the two spacecraft will pass within just 15 to 30 metres (50 to 100 feet) of each other at an altitude of around 900 kilometres or 560 miles. And because both are dead as doornails, there's no way Earth can communicate with them to conduct evasive manoeuvres.

There’s no doubt about it: With humans spending the last few decades sending things up in space, there are definitely a lot of stuff up there, all of which are just steadily whizzing around our planet’s orbit.

Numbering up to thousands, most of these are old and defunct satellites that are long past their use, just zooming by each other without ever having a collision, surprisingly. However, according to a recent update, one might just happen later this week.

Satellite Collision

Per LeoLabs, a space debris tracking service, the two satellites in question that would probably collide with each other are IRAS ( (a decommissioned space telescope launched in 1983) and GGSE-4 (a retired science payload launched in 1967).

According to data released by LeoLabs, the two spacecraft will pass just within 15 to 30 meters of each other at an altitude of around 560 miles (900 kilometers). And because both are old and decommissioned satellites, no one on Earth would be able to communicate with them and hopefully steer them away from each other. Because of this, LeoLabs’ calculations state that there’s a one in 100 chance that they’ll hit each other in grand dead satellite fashion.

“This is a really, really close encounter. And if this does actually come to pass, there's potentially a large amount of debris that will be created,” Alice Gorman, space archaeologist at Flinders University, said.

I would say this is one of one of the most dangerous possible collisions that we've seen for some time.