The space station will perform an emergency maneuver to dispose of space debris

sA “space debris avoidance maneuver” has been programmed to prevent stray space debris from colliding with the International Space Station (ISS), in what is becoming an increasingly routine procedure.

Initial calculations indicate that the file space junk It will arrive within 600 meters of the International Space Station on Thursday, November 11, at approximately 8:00 p.m. ET (Friday, November 12 at 4:00 a.m. Moscow time), according to the Russian Space Agency. Roscosmos. This is too close to be comfortable, requiring the International Space Station to be positioned well out of the danger zone. The exercise is scheduled for Wednesday at 3:15 p.m. ET (11:15 p.m. Moscow time).

“The potential for impact and risk to the ISS is extremely low,” a NASA spokesperson explained in an email, adding that “the maneuver is a standard maneuver for the space station and does not require the crew to take any specific action.”

The sudden need to move the International Space Station is not expected to affect the launch of SpaceX’s Crew-3 mission, which takes off on the same day (November 10) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA officials noted during the pre-flight press. conspiracy.

The scrap is from the remnants of the Fengyun-1C ship. China deliberately destroyed its own weather satellite in January 2007 as part of an anti-satellite missile test. The event sparked a lot of anger, as experts they criticized China for its contribution to the militarization of space and the deliberate production of a dangerous cloud of orbital debris. A fictional version of this event was filmed in the movie gravity 2013, as a rapidly expanding cloud of debris caused by Russia’s accidental downing of a spy satellite, destroyed the International Space Station.

To keep this story a fiction, flight controllers plan to move the EEI by powering the engines of the Russian Soyuz MS-18 transport vehicle, which is currently moored at the station. The chosen thrust will move the space station at a speed of 0.7 meters per second for 6 minutes, according to Roscosmos. The maneuver will increase the space station’s altitude by 1,240 meters, putting it in an operational orbit about 421 kilometers above Earth.

EEI to make 29 evasive maneuvers in the last 22 years, of which three are in 2020. The last one happened on September 22, 2020, when space debris from a Japanese rocket threatened to pass 1.39 km from the orbital station.

It’s a trend that’s likely to get worse over time, as satellites move deeper and deeper into low Earth orbit and as orbital debris increases in size, and while we continue to do nothing significant about it, such as Limit Objects allowed in space or by financing the development of satellites capable of this sweep up Our orbital perturbation.