The Worldwide Area Station (ISS) needed to carry out a particles avoidance maneuver to dodge yet one more piece of area junk on Tuesday (March 14).
Russia’s federal area company Roscosmos reported that the incident occurred at 2:54 p.m. Moscow time, or 7:54 a.m. EDT (1154 GMT) on Tuesday, in a assertion (opens in new tab) on Telegram. The Russian Progress MS-22 cargo capsule presently docked on the orbital laboratory fired its thrusters for 135 seconds to maneuver the station to security and alter its common altitude to 260 miles (419 km) above Earth’s floor.
The incident marks the second time in a month that the Worldwide Area Station has needed to carry out such a maneuver. On March 6, the identical Progress capsule fired its thrusters for six minutes to keep away from a potential collision with a business Earth-imaging satellite tv for pc. In accordance with a 2022 NASA report, the ISS needed to carry out comparable maneuvers to dodge satellites and trackable particles a complete of 32 instances from 1999 by way of the time of the report’s publication.
Associated: How typically does the Worldwide Area Station need to dodge area particles?
In 2022, the ISS needed to carry out two separate avoidance maneuvers to dodge particles created by a Russian anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons take a look at carried out in November 2021 that was condemned by the worldwide group.
Comparable incidents have compelled the cancellation of spacewalks and prompted astronauts to take shelter aboard the ISS. The frequency of those incidents is growing as spaceflight exercise will increase worldwide. Low Earth orbit continues to develop into more and more crowded with satellites and items of area junk, a lot so {that a} group of NASA scientists and different specialists are actually calling for a world treaty to deal with the harmful orbital particles downside. So far, a possible resolution has but to be discovered, as increasingly objects are lofted to orbit.
And the orbital particles downside can snowball; as extra space junk fills Earth’s orbit, the danger of collisions between items of area junk will increase — and such collisions would create much more items of particles.
NASA plans to function the ISS till 2030, at which level it’s going to deorbit the lab to a fiery demise over open ocean. The company is already planning the growth of spacecraft to help in its retirement.
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