Mark Megahan
As W&B reported earlier this week, there is a phenomenal amount of space junk floating around our planet. On Monday, October 24, the International Space Station announced they had to take evasive action to avoid some. The crew fired the thrusters just in time.
Space station endangered by Junk
There’s so much litter and junk swarming around planet Earth that we need to update that “crying Indian” commercial from the 1970s. It could show a modern day Native American looking out a Falcon 9 porthole with tears in his eyes, as a dead satellite tumbles past.
NASA is not happy about some trash left floating around in space by Russia. They may send Vladimir Putin a bill for the fuel the ISS was forced to burn due to the Kremlin’s lack of environmental responsibility. We’re just as bad though.
According to the press release, the “International Space Station fired its thrusters to maneuver out of the way of a piece of oncoming Russian space junk.”
They had to do a “five minute, five second burn to avoid a fragment of Russia’s Cosmos 1408 satellite, which the country destroyed in a weapons test in November last year.” Without mentioning that the British are working on a project to start collecting space garbage, NASA pointed out that they told us so.
“Officials at NASA have previously warned about the risks of the proliferation of debris in space, caused by a dramatic increase in the number of satellites in orbit and several instances of governments intentionally destroying satellites and creating new plumes of junk.”
They knew this would happen some day so already had the action plan in place.
A pre-Determined maneuver
As detailed in the NASA press release, the station used their “Pre-Determined Debris Avoidance Maneuver” plan. That gave the habitat “an extra measure of distance away from the predicted track of a fragment of Russian Cosmos 1408 debris.” The junk was able to safely whizz by.
The maneuver “had no impact on station operations.” Calculations had the fragment within “three miles from the station.”
After the burn, the station flew 2/10 of a mile higher. That’s a really good thing and it may want to stay in that new track for a while.
“On November 15, 2021, Cosmos 1408, a no longer operational satellite, was destroyed, generating a cloud of debris including some 1,500 pieces of trackable space debris.” That means an awful lot of junk is likely to come flying by in a cloud which isn’t “trackable.”
The Pentagon couldn’t resist giving the Kremlin a piece of their mind over the incident. “U.S. Space Command said Russia tested a direct-ascent anti-satellite, or DA-ASAT missile and strongly condemned the anti-satellite test.”
Actually, they called it “a reckless and dangerous act” and added that they “won’t tolerate” behavior that “puts international interests at risk.“
