ESA teams respond to debris risk | Rocket Science
▻http://blogs.esa.int/rocketscience/2017/01/24/esa-operations-teams-respond-to-debris-risk
For the past few days, experts from ESA’s Space Debris Office at ESOC in Darmstadt, Germany, have been assessing a conjunction (read: collision) forecast issued by the US armed forces’ Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) located at Vandenberg Air Force base in California.
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JSpOC has identified a close approach for Swarm-B forecast to occur on 25 January at 23:10:55 UTC, which will be 00:10:55 CET on 26 January. The forecast miss distance is just 361 m, and this triggers a risk above the 1/10,000 risk threshold.
The chaser object is a piece of Cosmos-375 fragmentation debris. It is very small, having a radar cross-section of just 0.02 m2.
“This corresponds to a size of about 15 cm” says Tim Flohrer, the space debris analyst on duty this week at ESA’s Space Debris Office.
“With 130 observations in the database, it’s a very well tracked object, and we’re pretty confident that we know its orbit with a high degree of accuracy.”
Nonetheless, there are uncertainties in its orbit, on the order of 1000m in the along-track direction. This means it could easily come much closer than 361m to Swarm-B, and potentially even collide.