ASAT tests: The reason we can’t have nice things

That’s right, this is why we can’t have nice things. Debris from the satellite China destroyed with an anti-satellite missile in January 2007 has finally done what everyone was afraid of: it hit another satellite, possibly causing serious damage.

According to Space.com, the debris from China’s 1,600-pound FY-1C weather satellite collided with Russia’s tiny "Ball Lens In The Space (BLITS) retroreflector satellite" (we have no idea what that means, either) on January 22.

Like we said, the international community has been worrying about this for a long time. Almost immediately after China shot down its relatively new satellite just to show that it could, it was condemned by the U.S. government for introducing a massive cloud of dangerous debris into the very crowded orbital highways. (The image above shows the debris stream roughly one month after the test, the lone white track represents the orbit of the International Space Station.)

China is believed to have used a modified version of its DF-21 ballistic missile (the same missile on which its DF-21D carrier-killer is based) to smash the satellite orbiting 537-miles above Earth into 2,841 pieces of "high-velocity" debris. That debris has twice passed close to the International Space Station.

To be fair, the United States destroyed an orbiting satellite for similar reasons — to prove it could — using a missile lobbed into space by an F-15 Eagle fighter in 1985. That test was reportedly rushed before Congress banned such activities due to the dangers posed by space debris and a desire to avoid militarizing space.

Anyway, the ever growing cloud of space debris and trash is a huge driver behind the U.S. military’s push to improve its so-called Space Situational Awareness. Basically, it wants to know what’s going on in the vicinity of all of its satellites so that it can steer them clear of a potential collision. Right now, the U.S. and other nations mostly rely on catalogues listing the orbits and last known locations of debris and satellites instead of real-time monitoring.