Do tiny satellites such as CubeSats pose a risk to other satellites?

摘要

In August 2016, the European Space Agency reported that a <5 mm fragment of space junk collided with its Sentinel 1A spacecraft-and tore a hole nearly half a metre wide in one of its solar panels. Unfortunately, that produced yet more space debris! It's not the first collision in space. In our story on the Iridium Satellite Phone system (Silicon Chip, November 2017) we told how in 2009 an errant "dead" Russian satellite (Kosmos 2251) collided with, and destroyed, the new lridium-33 satellite.