Former Russian Spy Satellite Nearly Obliterates NASA Space Telescope (Video)

It was a near miss. A high-tech NASA telescope in orbit escaped a major collision with a former Soviet-era Russian spy satellite last year. The crash would have resulted in an explosion that would have released as much energy as two and a half tons of explosives.

Fortunately, NASA scientists were on the job. Their $690 million Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which studies the most powerful explosions in the universe, would have been quite the loss if it had collided with the piece of space junk. That's why they decided to take precautions.

They first realized that there was a potential of a collision on March 29 when they found that the former satellite and telescope would miss each other by just 700 feet. Yet like with an approaching hurricane, the researchers constantly had to update the space junk's trajectory. The next day, they found that the two spacecraft would zip through the same point in space within 30 milliseconds of one another, a situation which almost guaranteed that the two would smash into each other.

In fact, the former spy satellite was travelling at a speed of 27,000 miles per hour in relation to the telescope. In order to avoid this potentially devastating crash, NASA scientists started planning for fire the telescope's thrusters in order to move it out of the way in time. On April 3, 2012, the two pieces of equipment missed each other by six miles.

While the telescope avoided collision, it does highlight the issue of space junk currently orbiting our planet. As the years have passed, we have thrown more and more trash into the Earth's orbit--pieces of old satellites, decommissioned spacecraft and miscellaneous pieces of metal and other debris. These pieces, in turn, collide with each other and break apart to form even more space trash. In fact, the 6^th European Conference on Space Debris was recently held in Germany to discuss the issue.

Want to see how close the satellite and the telescope came to one another? NASA released a video that shows just that. You can check it out below, courtesy of NASA.