The Worldwide Area Station took some evasive motion on Tuesday (Nov. 19).
A Russian Progress cargo ship that is docked to the ISS fired its thrusters for five.5 minutes on Tuesday afternoon starting at 3:09 p.m. EST (2009 GMT). The objective was to verify the orbiting advanced dodged a doubtlessly harmful piece of area junk.
“The Pre-determined Particles Avoidance Maneuver (PDAM) was performed in coordination with NASA, Roscosmos and the opposite area station companions,” NASA officers wrote in an replace on Tuesday. (Roscosmos is Russia’s area company.) “With out the maneuver, ballistics officers estimated that the fragment may have come inside round 2.5 miles [4 kilometers] of the station.”
The particles in query was a part of a “defunct protection meteorological satellite tv for pc that broke up in 2015,” in response to the replace.
Such avoidance maneuvers aren’t terribly unusual: A December 2022 NASA evaluation reported that the ISS had carried out evasive burns 32 instances since 1999.
That quantity has gone up since — the ISS dodged area junk twice in a week-long stretch in March 2023, for instance — and it’ll proceed to rise as low Earth orbit will get increasingly crowded with satellites and items of particles, resembling defunct rocket phases.
Associated: How usually does the Worldwide Area Station must dodge area particles?
Tuesday’s avoidance maneuver occurred simply two hours earlier than a giant spaceflight occasion — the sixth take a look at flight of SpaceX’s Starship megarocket, which lifted off from the corporate’s Starbase website in South Texas at 5:00 p.m. EST (2200 GMT).
SpaceX is creating Starship to get folks and cargo to the moon and Mars, and to hold out quite a lot of different spaceflight duties. One such job is finishing the meeting of the corporate’s Starlink broadband megaconstellation in LEO, which at present consists of greater than 6,600 energetic satellites, however may in the future harbor greater than 40,000.
