{"id":200938,"date":"2025-12-25T07:23:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-25T07:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/200938\/"},"modified":"2025-12-25T07:23:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-25T07:23:13","slug":"chinese-and-starlink-satellites-nearly-collide-in-space-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/200938\/","title":{"rendered":"Chinese and Starlink satellites nearly collide in space"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two satellites, one Starlink and one Chinese, nearly collided this month as low Earth orbit fills up. <\/p>\n<p>The two came <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/news\/844502\/starlink-and-chinese-satellites-nearly-collided-last-week\" class=\"styles_linkEmbed__SNmaX\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">within some 650 feet<\/a> of each other. There are at least 24,000 objects, including debris and satellites, in LEO, and there could be 70,000 satellites by 2030. <\/p>\n<p>Close passes are increasingly common: <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2025-12-days-disaster-earth-orbit.html\" class=\"styles_linkEmbed__SNmaX\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" target=\"_blank\">Two satellites pass within a kilometer (0.62 miles) of each other every 22 seconds<\/a>, new research suggested. <\/p>\n<p><img src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/45c7067b3040d10a195d5f92d5af5baa06c633e0-2580x1252.png\" alt=\"Chart enumerating objects in Earth orbit\" width=\"800\" height=\"388\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" fetchpriority=\"high\" class=\"styles_imageEmbed__QsLwb styles_fullContentArea__zXct_\" style=\"color:transparent\"\/><\/p>\n<p>The potential outcome is \u201cKessler syndrome,\u201d in which one collision creates a debris cloud, causing other collisions and eventually filling low orbit with shards of metal traveling at five miles a second. <\/p>\n<p>Satellites can adjust their positions to avoid crashes, but need to know where other objects are to do so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two satellites, one Starlink and one Chinese, nearly collided this month as low Earth orbit fills up. The&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-200938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}