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Moon crashing into earth
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Space junk eventually falls to Earth, where it is usually completely consumed in the fiery heat of friction with the atmosphere. Re-entry can take weeks, months or many years, depending on the magnitude of the object's orbit.
Some 6,000 satellites have been sent into space since the Soviet Union launched the first man-made orbiter, Sputnik 1, in 1957. About 3,000 satellites remain in operation, according to NASA.
"At this time, there is no danger to the scheduled launch," William Jeffs, a NASA spokesman based at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, told AFP.
Before the latest incident, there were over 300,000 orbital objects measuring between 0.4 and four inches (1 and 10 centimeters) in diameter and "billions" of smaller pieces, according to a 2008 report by an international monitoring group called the Space Security Index.
Travelling at speeds that can reach many thousands of miles (kilometers) per hour, the tiniest debris can damage or destroy a spacecraft.
The debris from the defunct 1,984-pound (900-kilogram) Russian satellite launched in 1993, and its 1,235-pound (560-kilogram) US counterpart could be significant.
"We are looking at around more than 500 pieces of debris," said Navy Lieutenant Charlie Drey, a spokesman with US Strategic Command (STRATCOM).
"Anytime you have something like this happen, there is a concern about other objects that are in orbit. Now that you have all this debris there, it does pose a risk to satellites," he told AFP.
Analysts are plotting the coordinates of each of the debris pieces, which will later be posted on the public website space-track.org.
Drey said STRATCOM's Joint Space Operations Center currently tracks and catalogs over 18,000 man-made objects orbiting the Earth using a worldwide space surveillance network of radar and optical space sensors.
"NASA's Earth-observing satellites orbit at an altitude of approximately 439 miles (707 kilometers), which is not far from the 491-mile (790 kilometers) altitude of the collision. They are of the highest concern as NASA learns more about the newly-created debris field," Yembrick said.