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US and Russian communications satellites have collided in space in the first
such reported accident.
A satellite owned by the US company Iridium hit a defunct Russian satellite at
high speed nearly 780km (485 miles) over Siberia on Tuesday, Nasa said.
The risk to the International Space Station and a shuttle launch planned for
later this month is said to be low.
The impact produced massive clouds of debris, and the magnitude of the crash is
not expected to be clear for weeks.
There are thousands of man-made objects orbiting the earth, but this is thought
to be the first time two intact spacecraft have hit each other, the BBC's Andy
Gallacher in Miami says.
Nasa is now tracking the hundreds of pieces of wreckage from the collision.
It is hoped that most of it will burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, our
correspondent adds.
Shuttle launch
The concern is whether the debris will spread and pose any risk to the ISS,
which is orbiting the earth some 435km below the course of the collision.
According to the Washington Post, a Nasa memo said officials determined the
risk to be "elevated" but have estimated it as "very small and within
acceptable limits".
Nasa spokesman John Yembrick said the ISS has the "capability of doing a
debris-avoidance manoeuvre if necessary".
He said this had happened on just eight previous occasions during the course of
its 60,000-plus orbits.
Officials said there were no plans to delay the launch of Nasa's space shuttle
Discovery later this month, although that would re-evaluated in coming days.
Nicholas Johnson, an orbital debris expert at the Johnson Space Center in
Houston, said the Hubble Space Telescope and Earth-observing satellites, closer
to the collision site and at a higher orbit, were at greater risk of damage,
according to the Associated Press.
'Extremely unusual'
Communications firm Iridium, based in Bethesda, Maryland, said it "lost an
operational satellite" after it was struck on Tuesday by the Russian satellite.
It said its clients may experience some brief outages until it had temporarily
fixed the problem by Friday.
Iridium said it hoped to replace the 560kg satellite, launched in 1997, with
one of its in-orbit spares within the next 30 days.
The firm described it as an "extremely unusual, very low-probability event",
stressing that it was not caused by any fault on its part.
Russia's civilian space agency, Roscosmos, confirmed the collision with the
defunct 950kg (2,094lb) satellite, which was launched in 1993.
Spokesman Aleksandr Vorobyev was quoted as saying the satellite had "in all
likelihood... belonged in the past to the military", and was therefore not the
responsibility of Roscosmos.
He did not comment on claims the satellite was out of control, and said the
incident would be investigated.
Littered orbit
Space debris experts say such a collision had only been a matter of time.
Litter in orbit - caused in part by the break-ups of old satellites - has
increased to such an extent that it is now the biggest threat to a space
shuttle in flight.
Mr Johnson said that at the beginning of this year around 17,000 manmade pieces
of debris were orbiting earth.
The items, some as small as four inches (10cm), are tracked by the US Space
Surveillance Network - sending information to help spacecraft avoid the debris.
Some 6,000 satellites have been sent into orbit since 1957.
Around 3,000 remain in operation, according to Nasa.