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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military on Tuesday said it met its goal of conducting collision analysis on 800 maneuverable satellites in September, and expects to be able to track 500 more non-maneuvering satellites by year's end.
The U.S. Air Force began upgrading its ability to predict possible collisions in space after a dead Russian military communications satellite and a commercial U.S. satellite owned by Iridium collided on February 10.
Air Force officials said the crash, which was not predicted by the U.S. military or private tracking groups, underscored the vulnerability of U.S. satellites, which are used for a huge array of military and civilian purposes.
Air Force Lieutenant General Larry James, who heads U.S. Strategic Command's Joint Functional Component Command for Space, told reporters the Air Force met its goal for tracking possible collisions among 800 satellites that have the ability to be moved, ahead of an October target date.
"Our goal now is to do that conjunction assessment for all active satellites ... roughly around 1,300 satellites ... by the end of the year and provide that information to users as required," James told reporters on a teleconference during a space conference in Omaha, Nebraska.
Some of the 500 satellites still to be assessed cannot be shifted because they do not carry extra fuel that would be needed to move them once in orbit.
The Air Force tracks about 21,000 objects in space, including active and dead satellites, spent rocket stages and other junk floating around, James said.
To increase its ability to predict possible collisions, the Air Force has been buying more computers and hiring analysts. It also works with commercial satellite operators to share data collected by their spacecraft and by U.S. government sources.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa, editing by Alan Elsner)
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