A satellite belonging to China was spotted at the end of last month grabbing one of the long-dead satellites and after a few days, it was thrown into a graveyard located 300 kilometres away from where the objects were less likely to hit any spacecraft.
These events were presented at a webinar hosted by the Center of Strategic and International Studies and Secure World Foundation by Brien Flewelling last month. He is the chief Space Situational Awareness architect of the private United States Company called ExoAnalytic Solutions that is responsible for tracking the position of satellites using a large network of optic telescopes.
On January 22, the Chinese satellite called SJ-21 was seen changing its usual place in the sky to approach one of the decommissioned satellites Compass-G2. After a few days, G2 was attached to SJ-21 altering its orbit. The space tug that occurred has not been confirmed by the officials of China yet. After a few days of the incident, the spacecraft couple had started dancing westward, as shown in the video footage of ExoAnalytic. By January 26, both the satellites had separated and G2 was then kicked into oblivion.
The Compass-G2 also called the BeiDou-2 G2 is a Chinese spacecraft that belongs to the BeiDou-2 Navigation Satellite System and it had failed shortly after its launch in 2009. For the next decade, the satellite that had turned into nothing more than a metal carcass was wandering around the Earth alongside billions of pieces of trash in space. SJ-21 was launched in October last year has now returned to a GEO (Geostationary Orbit) located above the Congo Basin. The GEO happens whenever a satellite orbits Earth over the equator at the same speed the planet is rotating at.
From the Earth’s point of view, the satellites in GEO now seem to be standing still. These orbits are also known as a Clarke orbit after the famous British sci-fi writer called Arthur C. Clarke as he was the one to popularise the idea of GEO in a 1945 paper and guaranteed that it was going to revolutionise telecommunications. Less than twenty years later, the first GeoStationary Satellite was launched from the Earth.
What happened with the Chinese spacecraft is not uncommon and there is nothing wrong with throwing trash in space. But many nations are currently trying to develop technologies to clear out the junk in space. For instance, Japan has already launched the ELSA-d mission in March last year which was designed to test space debris capturing and removing technologies. The ESA (European Space Agency) has also planned to launch its space trash removal mission in the year 2025.
Some worry has been expressed about the Chinese trash disposal satellite like the SJ-21. According to James Dickinson, commander of the United States Space Command stated in 2021 that such technology could be used in a future system to possibly harm or grapple other satellites as well. Back in 2021, some reports had claimed that both Russia and China were working towards the development of a technology with counter-space capabilities that would be able to destruct space systems. However, there has been no proof that the Chinese government have facilitated any destructive operations in outer space.
