An unknown small object, traveling thousands of miles per hour, punctured a satellite in Earth‘s orbit.
The satellite company NanoAvionics released images online showing the damage to its MP42 satellite, launched in 2022 and designed to host several instruments for different customers. The source of the hole from a chickpea-sized object is uncertain, but the event underscores the growing risk to spacecraft in orbit around our planet.
“Whether this impact was from a micrometeoroid or a piece of space debris, the collision highlights the need for responsible space operations in orbit and makes us reflect on satellite resilience against these types of events,” the company posted online.
Though natural impacts from small meteoroids — which are fragments of an asteroid — are inevitable in our solar system (a place teeming with asteroids), both space agencies and companies alike don’t want human-created space debris to increase. That would, of course, endanger everyone’s interests, and may eventually spawn a domino effect of continually increasing space collisions called the Kessler effect. (Mashable previously spoke with Don Kessler, a former senior scientist for orbital debris research at NASA, about this debris risk.)
The impact of the MP42 satellite thankfully didn’t contribute to a debris problem, but as shown below, left a hole in a solar panel.
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On bottom left, a zoomed-in view shows the six millimeter (quarter-inch) hole left by the recent collision.
Credit: Kongsberg NanoAvionics
NanoAvionics noted that it has joined the European Space Agency’s Zero Debris Charter, which aim to significantly reduce the creation of new space debris by 2030. Just a small object packs a big punch. “A collision with a 1cm particle travelling 10 km/s (of which there are about a million in orbit) releases the same energy as a small car crashing at 40 km/h,” the agency said.
“By joining this initiative, we’re helping to ensure that NanoAvionics’ satellites and those from our customers operate responsibly and contribute to a safer future in space,” NanoAvionics wrote.
Operating responsibly means that defunct spacecraft self-dispose themselves into Earth’s atmosphere, where they’ll largely burn up. It also means designing craft that don’t intentionally release space debris (like lens caps or rocket parts), vigilantly monitoring for potential collisions (the International Space Station, for example, has to at times move to avoid a heightened impact threat), and of course discouraging the irresponsible destruction of spacecraft.
Today, unregulated orbital trash now permeates a region of space around Earth called low Earth orbit, or LEO.
“LEO is an orbital space junk yard,” NASA explained. “There are millions of pieces of space junk flying in LEO. Most orbital debris comprises human-generated objects, such as pieces of spacecraft, tiny flecks of paint from a spacecraft, parts of rockets, satellites that are no longer working, or explosions of objects in orbit flying around in space at high speeds.”