The Worldwide House Station (ISS) needed to carry out a particles avoidance maneuver to dodge yet one more piece of space junk on Tuesday (March 14).
Russia’s federal space 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 statement (opens in new tab) on Telegram. The Russian Progress MS-22 cargo capsule at the moment docked on the orbital laboratory fired its thrusters for 135 seconds to maneuver the station to security and modify its common altitude to 260 miles (419 km) above Earth’s floor.
The incident marks the second time in a month that the International Space Station has needed to carry out such a maneuver. On March 6, the identical Progress capsule fired its thrusters for six minutes to avoid a possible collision with a industrial Earth-imaging satellite. In accordance with a 2022 NASA report, the ISS needed to carry out related maneuvers to dodge satellites and trackable particles a total of 32 times from 1999 by the time of the report’s publication.
Associated: How often does the International Space Station have to dodge space debris?
In 2022, the ISS needed to perform two separate avoidance maneuvers to dodge particles created by a Russian anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons take a look at performed in November 2021 that was condemned by the international community.
Comparable incidents have pressured the cancellation of spacewalks and prompted astronauts to take shelter aboard the ISS. The frequency of those incidents is rising as spaceflight exercise will increase worldwide. Low Earth orbit continues to turn into more and more crowded with satellites and items of space junk, a lot so {that a} group of NASA scientists and different consultants at the moment are calling for an international treaty to sort out the damaging orbital particles drawback. So far, a possible resolution has but to be discovered, as an increasing number of objects are lofted to orbit.
And the orbital particles drawback can snowball; as extra space junk fills Earth’s orbit, the chance of collisions between pieces of space 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 should deorbit the lab to a fiery demise over open ocean. The company is already planning the development of spacecraft to assist in its retirement.
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