The International Space Station (ISS) prepared yesterday to carry out a space debris evasion maneuver in order to prevent it from spreading through space.
Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, has confirmed this through a statement in which it reports this decision, because the distance between the ISS and the space debris was above 600 meters .
This action was carried out yesterday at 9:15 p.m. Spanish time, carrying out a maneuver that consisted of moving the modular station away from space debris . According to Roscosmos, the piece belonged to the Chinese meteorological satellite ‘Fengyun-1C’.
The Cnet medium explains that China destroyed this satellite in January 2007 because it was part of a test of anti-satellite missiles , causing its pieces to spread throughout space until reaching a point where it was impossible to identify them due to their miniscule size.
To carry out this maneuver, the International Space Station has used the ‘Progress MS-18’ refueling ship, as it is incorporated into its structure and has orientation and coupling motors that turn on in just over six minutes. Consequently, it was possible to increase the altitude of the space station by 1,240 meters to place it in an operational orbit, about 421 kilometers above the Earth .
When the system completes the tests, it will self-destruct.
A spokesman for NASA claimed to Gizmodo that “the likelihood of impact and risk to the International Space Station is very low, the maneuver is standard and does not require the crew to take any specific action.”
Seeing this type of action is quite common because it avoids collisions, and the chances are very high that space debris could damage the infrastructure of the ISS. On the other hand, this type of junk is becoming a trend and is getting worse over time as satellites enter low Earth orbit .
