Agency Terms Event A Close Call

In the first maneuver of its kind, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had to move one of its spacecraft recently to protect it from man-made orbital debris.

The Terra environmental spacecraft was moved by flight controllers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, to avoid a potential collision because of a test of a Chinese anti-satellite (A-Sat) weapon in January, according to Fox News.

Flight controllers "briefly fired" the spacecraft's thrusters June 22, moving it 0.8 miles after analysis predicted a seven percent chance of collision with debris from the destroyed Chinese satellite Fengyun 1-C the next day.

Fengyun 1-C was a defunct Chinese weather satellite orbiting at about 528 miles up when it was destroyed January 11 by a controversial kinetic energy A-Sat weapon. As ANN reported, analysts feared the test would usher in an anti-satellite arms race, or was a political ploy by the Chinese to force the Bush administration into a weapons ban negotiation.

"This is the first real escalation in the weaponization of space that we've seen in 20 years," said Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell to The New York Times. "It ends a long period of restraint."

"It could be a shot across the bow," agreed Theresa Hitchens, Center for Defense Information director, a private group in Washington tracking various military programs. "For several years, the Russians and Chinese have been trying to push a treaty to ban space weapons. The concept of exhibiting a hard-power capability to bring somebody to the negotiating table is a classic cold war technique."

Goddard's conjunction assessment manager for the NASA's Earth science satellite constellation, Lauri Newman, said she received an orbital debris report from the US Air Force indicating a small piece of debris, about 15 inches long, was on a course for a possible collision with Terra.

"We found the event on a Monday during routine analysis and did the maneuver on (that) Friday," she said.

The cloud of debris is being monitored by the military's Space Surveillance Network.

It is not known for certain if a collision would have occurred had the satellite not been moved. Additional analysis showed a collision was, indeed, still possible, Newman said.

"We got one final prediction after we did the maneuver and that showed that it was still in the error bands that we were showing before," she said.

When asked if the event was a close call, Newman replied, "from what we've seen so far, yes."

Fox reports NASA will typically fire the satellite's engine three to five times a year to compensate for normal atmospheric drag.

Michael Krepon, cofounder of the Washington-based Henry L. Stimson Center, a private group studying national security said the current administration has argued a global space-weapons treaty was unnecessary not only because the last such tests were 20 years ago... but also because no such weapons existed, according to the Times.

"It seems," he said, "that argument is no longer operative."

FMI: www.nasa.gov, www.stimson.org, www.cdi.org