According to the head of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, the International Space Station (ISS) had to adjust to avoid collision with a piece of debris from a U.S. rocket.
“Five minutes ago, the ISS avoided conjunction with U.S. space debris, the Pegasus carrier rocket remnants Rogozin said according to TASS news agency.
Rogozin had said that the maneuver to avoid the piece of debris from the U.S rocket launched in 1994 was planned for 10:58 Moscow time.
Space debris is becoming more and more dangerous in space posing a great risk not to only astronauts in space but also to most of the satellites. Earlier this week, NASA postponed a spacewalk originally scheduled for Tuesday after receiving a space debris warning for the international space station (ISS).
Just hours before the astronauts were due to venture out of the ISS, the agency said on its Twitter account that ” due to the lack of opportunity to properly assess the risk,” it had decided to delay the spacewalk.
The six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk was later carried out successfully on Thursday, with NASA astronauts Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron replacing a malfunctioning communications antenna and achieving other ” get ahead tasks”.
Thousands of hundreds of debris are in space circling the earth and most of them are from satellites launched in space but recent, the test of anti-satellite weapons by countries like the U.S., Russia, China, and India have worsened the situation since blowing a satellite creates tens of thousands of small pieces in space which are a threat to functioning satellites.
Currently, there are two space stations orbiting the earth; one is the International space station (ISS) and another one is the Chinese space station called Tiangong. they are both occupied by humans.
There has been talking of cleaning the space for many years now by capturing all the debris and bringing them back to earth or burning them as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere but that is yet to happen.
If the debris from satellite launches continues increasing in addition to debris caused by the destruction of satellites in space in a test for anti-satellite weapons, we may find ourselves trapped to earth by that debris.
