A dead Soviet satellite and a discarded Chinese rocket body sped toward each other in space this week, but avoided a catastrophic crash on Thursday night.

LeoLabs, a company that uses radar to track satellites and debris in space, said on Tuesday that it was monitoring a "very high-risk" conjunction — an intersection in the two objects' orbits around Earth.

Since the Soviet satellite and Chinese rocket body are both defunct, nobody could move them out of each other's way.

"The space-debris community is constantly warning about all these close approaches, and we're not wrong or lying about this," Ted Muelhaupt, who oversees The Aerospace Corporation's space-debris analysis, told Business Insider.

Collisions between pieces of space junk make the problem worse since they fragment objects into smaller pieces.

"Each time there's a big collision, it's a big change in the LEO [low-Earth orbit] environment," Dan Ceperley, the CEO of LeoLabs, previously told Business Insider.

Combined, the Soviet satellite and the Chinese rocket body that just careened past each other have a mass of nearly three metric tons (2,800 kilograms).

In January, the company calculated a possible collision between a dead space telescope and an old US Air Force satellite.

The US Air Force, which tracks satellites for the government, did not notify NASA about that potential collision, the space agency told Business Insider at the time

"We are seeing recently a decided uptick in the number of conjunctions," Dan Oltrogge, an astrodynamicist who researches orbital debris at Analytical Graphics, Inc, told Business Insider

"It is a long-term effect that takes place over decades and centuries," Muelhaupt told Business Insider in January

"This has a massive impact on the launch side," he told CNN Business, adding that rockets "have to try and weave their way up in between these [satellite] constellations."