The Russian debris came within 14.5 meters (about 48 feet) of the satellite, according to the China National Space Administration’s Space Debris Monitoring and Application Center.
Had a collision occurred, it could have set off a “hysonic shock wave,” said Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, explaining, “it came close enough that it could have hit easily.”
“A piece big enough to be tracked like this, it hits at 12,000 miles per hour, and you get a hypersonic shock wave going through the satellite that reduces it to shrapnel, to confetti,” he said.
McDowell describes China’s claim that the two objects came within such a specific distance as “nonsense because there is no way they can know that accurately.”
Based on publicly available data from space tracking in the US, McDowell says the two objects could have hit within a few hundred meters to a few centimeters of each other.
“The fact that it’s still there means it wasn’t hit, but that’s the only way you’ll know,” McDowell said.
Russia destroyed one of its own satellites last November during a test of direct-launch anti-satellite missiles, which the administration of US President Joe Biden has condemned as dangerous and irresponsible.
At the time, US Space Command said the test “generated more than 1,500 pieces of traceable orbital debris and will likely generate hundreds of thousands of pieces of smaller orbital debris.”