China recently reached out to NASA over a maneuver to prevent a possible collision between satellites, a space sustainability official said, marking a first for space traffic management.
“For years, if we had a conjunction, we would send a note to the Chinese saying, ‘We think we’re going to run into you. You hold still, we’ll maneuver around you,'” Alvin Drew, director for NASA Space Sustainability, said during a plenary session at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney, Australia, on Oct. 2.
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The move by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) comes as both the United States, notably through SpaceX’s commercial Starlink constellation, and China, in the shape of the Guowang and Thousand Sails megaconstellations, are rapidly increasing the number of satellites they have in orbit. This means an increasing need for satellite operators to coordinate to limit the chances of collisions between satellites and prevent events that cause new clouds of space debris.
The development also indirectly suggests that China’s space situational awareness, or understanding what is going on in orbit at any moment, has reached the level of being able to flag conjunctions and begin to coordinate with other operators.
China noted this as a priority in a 2022 space white paper that outlined its ambitions for the period 2021 to 2026. The country also recently stated that it is working on capabilities to remove junk from space.
Contact between CNSA and NASA is generally limited by the so-called Wolf Amendment, which prevents most bilateral interaction between NASA and Chinese state entities.