Satellite Collision.
May 4, 2013
Predicted collision on March 29, 2012
NASA scientists provided details this week of how they dodged a 1.5-ton bullet in space last year when they had to fire the thruster engines on the Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope to nudge it out of the way and narrowly avoid a collision with a 26-year-old defunct Soviet-era satellite.
Cosmos 1805 satellite
NASA said it learned of the possible collision on March 29, 2012 when it received an automatically generated report indicating that the $690 million Fermi Space Telescope and the Soviet Cosmos 1805 satellite would pass within 700 feet (213 meters) of each other in a week.
Fermi Gamma-ray Observatory spacecraft
Fermi mission scientists monitored the impending close call and then determined that the two spacecraft would actually pass within 30 milliseconds of each other.
Images, Text, Credits: Voice of Russia / RIA / NASA / Youtube.
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