The threat of the huge amount of space debris from the Earth’s orbit is becoming more and more real. A piece of such space junk that belongs to broken satellites can become extremely dangerous for a spaceship. The International Space Station is now even forced to perform some significant maneuvers to avoid space junk, as a new article from CNN reveals.
Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos (Russia’s space agency), reveals that a piece of debris from a rocket was about to hit the station. The Pegasus carrier rocket remnants were the ones representing the space debris.
Spacewalk delayed by NASA
The space debris has kept giving astronomers a lot of headaches lately. In late November, the American space agency had to delay a spacewalk because of the danger of collision with space junk.
NASA received a debris notification for the space station. Due to the lack of opportunity to properly assess the risk it could pose to the astronauts, teams have decided to delay the Nov. 30 spacewalk until more information is available. https://t.co/HJCXFWBd3Y pic.twitter.com/swj5hqusSo
— International Space Station (@Space_Station) November 30, 2021
The ISS stated the following, as cited by CBS News:
NASA received a debris notification for the space station. Due to the lack of opportunity to properly assess the risk it could pose to the astronauts, teams have decided to delay the Nov. 30 spacewalk until more information is available.
There are so many exciting experiments when it comes to the International Space Station that we lost count. The Russian crew even prepares to make a featured film on the ISS, and it will be named “The Challenge”.
The International Space Station is a result of the work and collaboration of five space agencies, and they’ll keep up the good work if nothing unexpected occurs. Those agencies are NASA from the USA, the European Space Agency (ESA), JAXA from Japan, Roscosmos from Russia, and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).
Wikipedia informs that as of early 2019, roughly 34,000 pieces of space debris larger than 10 cm were revolving around our planet. Furthermore, over 128 million pieces of space junk smaller than 1 cm were also in the Earth’s orbit.