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the International Space Station it simply dodged a rapidly moving chunk of orbiting garbage.
Controllers maneuvered the station away from a possible collision with a piece of debris today (September 22) at 5:19 pm EDT (2119 GMT). They did this by firing the thrusters in a Russian Progress cargo spaceship which is docked to the orbiting laboratory’s Zvezda service module, NASA officials said in an update today.
The three astronauts currently living aboard the station, NASA’s Chris Cassidy and cosmonauts Anatoli Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, took refuge in the Russian segment of the station during the maneuver to get closer to their Soyuz spacecraft, the NASA update declared.
This was done “as a precaution,” the update said. “At no time was the crew in danger.”
Related: 7 wild ways to clean up space junk
Complete maneuver burn. The astronauts are emerging from a safe haven.September 22, 2020
The trio’s stay near Soyuz, which will bring them back to Earth next month, was quite brief.
“Burn maneuver complete. Astronauts are emerging from a safe haven”, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted at 5:25 pm EDT (2125 GMT) today, just six minutes after the Progress booster fired.
Space junk it is a growing problem in Earth orbit. Nearly 129 million pieces of debris are buzzing around our planet right now, about 34,000 of which are over 4 inches (10 centimeters) wide, according to European Space Agency estimates.
At the altitude of the International Space Station, approximately 400 kilometers (250 miles) high, the material rotates around the Earth at approximately 28,200 kph (17,500 mph), so fast that a collision with even a small fragment of debris could cause serious damage to the orbiting laboratory.
Hence the evasive action today. The 150-second-long Progress burn propelled the station above the path of the unknown piece of debris, which would have carried the debris within 0.86 miles (1.39 kilometers) of the orbiting lab at 6 a.m. : 21 pm EDT (2221 GMT), the NASA Update stated.
Garbage dodging maneuvers are far from unknown to the orbiting laboratory. The station has made three of those moves in 2020 alone, Bridenstine said today at another tweet, stressing that “the debris is getting worse.”
And in January 2012, the controllers moved the station to avoid a possible collision with a piece of junk generated by a highly criticized 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test.
This story was updated at 7pm EDT on September 22 to include information from another tweet by Jim Bridenstine.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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