Beijing says the incident was “extremely dangerous.”
The rubble of Russian satellite destroyed last year by Moscow brushed against a Chinese satellite, in an “extremely dangerous” incident, according to Beijing.
The Chinese have a ambitious space program, which includes the launch of observation and positioning satellites -with military or civil objectives- and the sending of probes to the Moon or Mars, as well as manned missions.
According to the Space Debris Center of the Chinese Space Agency (CNSA), quoted on Tuesday by the Global Times newspaper, “debris” from the Russian satellite Kosmos1408 They passed “only 14.5 meters” from the Chinese scientific satellite Tsinghua on Tuesday.
The space authorities described the incident as “extremely dangerous”, according to the same source.
The Russian Ministry of Defense had admitted in mid-November, after a day of silence, that it had pulverized the Kosmos 1408, a old satellite dating from the soviet era.
The United States denounced what happened, which, in its opinion, generated a “cloud” of potentially dangerous waste for the International Space Station (ISS), its occupants, and for other spacecraft.
Liu Jing, an expert on space debris, highlighted to the Global Times that it is rare that debris and spacecraft were only 10 meters apart. In his opinion, the probability of a collision was “very high” and in theory it would have been necessary to take measures to avoid it.
This incident follows the revelation last month of other similar incidents involving two satellites of the American company SpaceX.
Beijing had denounced a “serious threat” to the safety of its astronauts after that the ships of the company, founded by billionaire Elon Musk, almost collided with the Chinese space station. (I)
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