- NASA says an “unknown piece of space debris” flew near the International Space Station on Tuesday.
- The debris, which was predicted to zip up the ISS at 6:21 p.m., would have been within 1.39 kilometers (0.86 miles) of the station.
- However, mission controllers fired the engine of a Russian cargo spaceship attached to move the orbital laboratory off the road.
- Over the decades space fears of space debris have increased, more satellites have been launched, countries are testing space weapons, and dead or disabled spacecraft have crashed into each other.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
A “piece of unidentified space debris” passed within a few kilometers of the International Space Station on Tuesday night, NASA said in a blog post.
Engineers predicted that Space Junk’s mysterious dog would arrive at 6:21 p.m., just 1.39 kilometers away or 0.9 miles away. It is a very close shave for moving objects at speeds of about 17,500 miles per hour or more than 10 times faster than a single bullet.
Although the waiver was predicted, NASA undertook an “abundance of caution” to avoid a collision with a football field-sized facility.
During the operation, three mission crew members, who lived on the station – astronauts Chris Cassidy and cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Evan Wagner – sealed themselves inside the ISS-linked Soyuz spaceship. In the event that the wreckage actually struck the station, his chances of escape would have improved.
Then, starting around 19:20 in the evening, the controllers of the Russian cargo spaceship fired for 1 second and a half seconds by Mission Control so as not to damage the large rotation laboratory complex.
Such a rigorous exercise is the standard protocol if the probability of a 1-in-10,000 collision is high, according to NASA.
Soon, crew members left their Soyuz a “safe haven.” Tweeted NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstein.
The more we move objects into orbit, the worse our space junk problem becomes.
Space junk has been a problem for ISS for years. The station has conducted at least 29 skipping maneuvers since 1999, although nearby events are becoming commonplace.
“We have maneuvered @ space_station 3 times in 2020 to avoid debris. In the last 2 weeks, 3 high-anxiety potential connections have occurred,” Bridenstein said. Said In another tweet. “The debris is getting worse!”
Even small pieces of junk are a big threat; A hit by a 10-centimeter sphere of aluminum is like hitting a 15-pound TNT, senior NASA scientist Jack Beck told Wire in 2010.
And right now in Earth orbit, millions of pieces of space junk are flying around at the same speed, consisting of more than 650,000 objects ranging from softbub-to-numb-sized, as Business Insider previously stated.
U.S. And as other countries enter a new era of commercial space travel and satellite use, this number is expected to increase. Humans have put about ten thousand satellites into orbit since the 1950s, about 70% of which have been destroyed, maimed or killed, according to The New Yorker. Sometimes a dead satellite can collide with another dead satellite, or produce functional, abundant new clouds of debris.
In addition, the U.S., Russia and India have tested anti-satellite weapons in recent years, launching a “kill vehicle” (essentially a large bullet) on a large missile to destroy an interstellar spacecraft and dispersing numerous pieces of debris in the process. .
A picture of the debris of space around the earth.
NASA
If enough debris is created, expanding chaos could provoke a thing called Kessler Syndrome, in which so much junk is flying around the planet that it would be very dangerous to launch almost anything into space.
Inevitably, we find ourselves trapped in our own junk, as does the astrophysicist Donald J. behind Kessler syndrome theory.
“We are entering a new era of debris control,” he wrote in 2009. “An era that will be dominated by a slowly increasing number of random catastrophic collisions.”
For now, the U.S. The Military Operated Space Surveillance Network (SSN) and its partners are monitoring as many things as possible in space – plus all possible space collisions. The network documents hundreds of thousands of potential combinations (or pays close payments) each year, instructing satellite operators – and agencies like NASA – to avoid further hits as much as possible.
In 2020, U.S. The Department of Commerce has requested an additional million 15 million for its budget next year to increase its efforts to monitor and eliminate space debris from its fund. That funding has not yet been approved, as Bridenstein noted after the ISS evasion maneuver.
He said, “Time for the Congress to provide 15 15 million for the OneCommerce for One, which has been requested by the @Pots for સFour CommercePfis.”
Dave Mosher contributed to the report.
