Why don't the artificial satellites, which orbit us, collide with each other?Currently, over 3,000 active satellites are orbiting the Earth, and an equal number are already out of orbit. In all,
there are more than 100 million fragments in Earth orbit. These fragments are space debris ranging in size
from 1 mm.The size of the near-Earth space is quite large.
But if you consider this space in numbers, 1 satellite or object is about 13,000 cubic kilometers. That's not much, a little more than half the volume of Lake Baikal. And given a velocity of over 28,000 kilometers per hour,
the chances of a collision would be quite high.For example, in 2009, the Iridium satellite collided with a spent spacecraft. The results of this accident were the destruction of the satellite and 2,300 pieces of large space debris.
