The already untidy mass of orbital debris that litters low Earth orbit nearly got nastier last month.
A head-on collision was averted between a spent upper stage from a Chinese rocket and the European Space Agency's (ESA) huge Envisat Earth remote-sensing spacecraft.
Space junk tracking information supplied by the U.S. military, as well as confirming German radar data, showed that the two space objects would speed by each other at a nail-biting distance of roughly 160 feet (50 meters).
ESA's Envisat tips the scales at 8 tons, with China's discarded rocket body weighing some 3.8 tons.