Satellites collide: accident or cold war?

If Bush was still President, I’d say don’t rule it out. But with Obama, no. Too new.

wasn’t this the first thing the aliens did in Independence Day? Somebody fire up a Mac and a torpedo, just in case.

I hears the Russian satellite was broken and just floating around out there. Its totally an accident.

Accident.
God, you sound like kevbo.

I heard that the odd of satellites hitting each other are a Trillion to one….no accident, but we will never know the truth.

If the odds are a million to one against something occuring, chances are
50–50 it will.

My ears are burning.

I read somewhere that they have anti-collision technology on many satellites, but I’m not seeing anything that says this was anything more than an accident. Still, if they’re tracking everything that’s larger than a baseball, you would think it would be relatively easy to predict an immanent collision and move the Iridium satellite out of the way.

If it were intentional, hard to say that there was any lasting or significant impact (other than financial).

From an interesting article in NetworkWorld:

[Iridium] has eight spare satellites flying in lower orbit than their production constellation, and the spares can maneuver up to replace ones that become inoperable, [the Iridium spokeswoman] says. In addition the company has two groundstations for sending and receiving traffic between the satellite and the Earth, plus two backups.

- and -

Independent groups that monitor satellite traffic say they could tell that the Iridium satellite and the Russian satellite were going to pass near each other, but because of other satellite traffic and space junk floating in the area, could not actually predict collision, according to published reports.

My money is on SPECTRE.

Probably an accident, they don’t sound important enough to make crash, and I thought that the Cold War was over. (It would be cool if it weren’t an accident though)

Hmmm .. maybe it was the most clever insurance scam in history !

@Zaku it’s called “QUANTUM” now.

Here’s a question, though. What are the odds of satellites and submarines colliding in the same week?

Considering submarines typically avoid active sonar and two-way communications as much as possible and rely almost completely on passive sonar as well as detailed underwater maps combined with hyper-accurate inertial tracking systems (i.e. they can hear things that make/reflect noise around them and can navigate around their bedroom in the dark), I amazed there aren’t more submarine incidents.

Although, since submarine activity is by its very nature extremely confidential, I’m also surprised when news of one actually leaks out.

@eponymoushipster – Thanks.