Illustration of NASA's TIMED spacecraft in orbit.
NASA’s TIMED spacecraft came within 10 meters of a defunct Russian satellite in February, narrowly avoiding a collision that would have created thousands of pieces of debris in low Earth orbit. Credit: NASA

While satellites frequently pass close to each other in low Earth orbit, TIMED and Cosmos 2221’s near miss was a particular cause for concern for NASA.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...