Mobile phone losing signal? Maybe it's the colliding satellites.
On February 12th two satellites unintentionally collided causing brief outages for some mobile phone customers, the U.S. Department of Defense being one of them.
One satellite was a U.S. commercial satellite owned by Iridium Satellite LLC while the other was a non-operational Russian communication satellite. The collision occurred at roughly 480 miles (780 kilometers) altitude, a typical altitude for phone communications and weather monitoring.
This latest incident makes us ask some important questions such as, how fragile is our technical infrastructure, how secure is our digital information really, and how in the hell do two satellites happen to collide within something as large as space?
