The International Space Station (ISS) maneuvered by changing its orbit, avoiding a most probable collision with loose space junk on November 11th as it had on board a number of astronauts & cosmonauts.
The Space Station (ISS) has been orbiting for 23 years; as per record during its lifetime, it had almost 30 close probable encounters with space debris & was only saved by the quick action taken by them that aided in evading potential collisions.
As reported, the ISS had three close near-misses occurring in the year 2020, but this year in the month of May, a very small piece of space debris hit the space station’s Canadian-built robot arm, causing a hole measuring 5mm approximately.
Recently, this week, debris loosened from the defunct Chinese weather satellite destroyed by a Chinese experiment of an anti-satellite missile test in the year 2007.
The exploding satellite had released approximately 3500 pieces of debris, a lot of them are still in orbit around the ISS & are moving in the space station’s orbital area.
The impending collision was, however, avoided by firing up rockets of the Progress Supply Spacecraft of Russia, which is docked with the ISS for a period extending to 6 minutes.
The firing of the docked Russian spacecraft changed the speed limit of ISS by 0.7 meters per second, thereby managing to change the orbited region to almost a high of 1.2 km to its already orbiting range of 400 km.
Space junk consists of defunct satellite parts & used rocket stages other than the natural space debris; these pose a major threat to ISS, whose sizes up to a football field that travels at a speed of 7.66 kilometers per second.
Space debris is also threatening other satellites like the Chinese Tiangong satellite & the Hubble Telescope too.
Any potential debris which has a potential collision will cause immense damage as the ISS travel at such high speeds that it can reach from Perth to Brisbane in under eight minutes.
The lower earth orbit is too crowded wherein almost 5000 satellites have orbited for operations; it’s not only satellites but the amount of artificial debris is huge.
There are around a million debris measuring in between 1 cm & 10 cm; 330 million pieces measuring in the range of 1 mm to 1 cm are very dangerous as the ISS travels at high speed, even a speck of paint or any marble size debris can cause sizeable damage.
To track each & every piece of debris is not technologically possible, but to keep our satellites safe, we will eventually have to come up with an excellent technology to track & clean the space frontier from debris if we are to benefit from our space exploration programs.