Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Robotic Satellite's First Military Mission?


When the article hit in February describing the collision of Russian and US space satellites, I was both surprised and suspicious. The satellites shared a popular near-Earth orbit at around 500 miles, but still, it's like having two grains of sand meet in a football stadium. Not impossible, but very unlikely, especially since these multi-million-dollar satellites are tracked by several Earth-based stations. The position of nearly 1000 satellites are monitored along with thousands of tiny items - some as small as 5cm. Now, a Russian General is saying the collision might have been a military test to prove if a robotic satellite could be capable of disabling or destroying an enemy satellite. Whether any of this is true or not remains to be seen, but I don't think we've heard the end of this story.

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