I found this interesting, and it gives nice
statistics and hisory:
https://gizmodo.com/space-station-will-make-an-emergency-maneuver-after-det-1848031344
Space Station Will Make an Emergency Maneuver After Detection of
Threatening Space Junk
A fragment from a Chinese weather satellite will come to within 2,000
feet of the ISS, prompting the orbital relocation.
ByGeorge Dvorsky
Today 12:30PM
The International Space Station as seen from Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft on
28 September 2021.
An impromptu “space debris evasion maneuver” 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
1,970 feet (600 meters) of the International Space Station on Thursday, November 11 at approximately 8:00 p.m. ET (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 maneuver is scheduled for Wednesday at 3:15
p.m. ET (11:15 p.m. Moscow time).
“The impact probability and risk to the International Space Station is
very low,” a spokesperson from NASA explained in an email, adding that
“the maneuver is a standard space station maneuver and does not require
the crew to take any specific action.”
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 Center 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 criticized 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.
The Future of Protection (Episode 2)
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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 2.3 feet per second (0.7 meters
per second) for six minutes, according to Roscosmos. The maneuver will
increase the space station’s altitude by 4,068 feet (1,240 meters),
placing it in an operational orbit some 262 miles (421 km) above Earth.
The ISS has performed 29 avoidance maneuvers 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 0.86 miles (1.39 kilometers) 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.
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