An impromptu “space debris evasion manoeuvre” has been scheduled to prevent errant space junk from slamming into the International Space Station, in what is becoming an increasingly routine procedure.
Preliminary calculations suggest the space junk will come to within 600 metres of the International Space Station on Friday, November 12 at approximately 12:00 p.m. AEDT (Friday, November 12 at 4:00 a.m. Moscow time), according to Russian space agency Roscosmos. That’s too close for comfort, requiring the ISS to be positioned farther away from the danger zone. The manoeuvre is scheduled for Wednesday at 7:15 p.m. AEDT (11:15 p.m. Moscow time).
The sudden need to relocate the ISS is not expected to affect the launch of Crew-3, which blasts off later today from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, as NASA officials noted yesterday during the pre-flight news conference.
The offending chunk of junk is a remnant of the Fengyun-1C spacecraft. China deliberately destroyed its own weather satellite in January 2007 as part of an anti-satellite missile test. The event prompted howls of outrage, as experts criticised China for contributing to the militarization of space and for deliberately producing a dangerous cloud of orbital debris. A fictional version of this event was portrayed in the 2013 film Gravity, in which a rapidly expanding cloud of debris, accidentally caused by Russia shooting down a defunct spy satellite, destroyed the ISS.
To keep that story rooted in fiction, flight controllers plan to move the ISS by igniting the engines of Russia’s Soyuz MS-18 transport vehicle, currently docked to the station. The chosen impulse strength will move the space station at a rate of 0.7 metres per second for six minutes, according to Roscosmos. The manoeuvre will increase the space station’s altitude by 1,240 metres, placing it in an operational orbit some 421 km above Earth.
The ISS has performed 29 avoidance manoeuvres over the past 22 years, including three in 2020. The most recent happened on September 22, 2020, when space junk belonging to a Japanese rocket stage threatened to pass within 1.39 kilometres of the orbital outpost.
It’s an upward trend that’s likely to get worse over time, as satellites increasingly enter low Earth orbit and as the volume of orbital debris likewise increases — and as we continue to drag our collective feet and neglect to do anything meaningful, such as limiting the objects allowed in space or funding the development of satellites capable of cleaning up our orbital mess.