Satellite Smashers

摘要

It's happened only three times, as far as we know: three occasions when two sizeable objects in Earth orbit have accidentally collided at high speed. The first, or the first to be clearly identified, was in July 1996, when a fragment from a long-disintegrated Ariane rocket stage hit a French military satellite called Cerise at nine miles a second. The impact cut in half a 20-foot boom extending from the spacecraft, thereby adding another bit of junk to the 12,000 pieces currently being tracked in space.