© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
The International Space Station (ISS) had to fire thrusters on the docked ISS Progress 83 resupply ship for over six minutes to avoid an approaching satellite, according to NASA. In recent times, such events where the ISS has to fire its thrusters to avoid colliding with debris and satellites have become increasingly common.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tweeted that the satellite in question was probably the Argentine earth observation satellite NuSat-17.
According to a report released by NASA in December 2022, the ISS had to fire its thrusters to avoid such collisions 32 times since 1999. In October 2022, ISS had to fire its thrusters for 5 minutes and 5 seconds to dodge the debris from the Russian Cosmos 1408 satellite, which was blown apart in 2021 as part of an anti-satellite attack test.
In recent years, the Low-Earth orbit or LEO has become increasingly crowded with the rapid proliferation of “constellations” of satellites from companies like SpaceX and OneWeb. And it is not just ISS that has to bear the brunt of this overpopulation.
A near miss between a rocket body and a dead satellite on January 27 illustrated how close we are to a space disaster which could have resulted in a disastrous scenario. On that day, an SL-8 rocket body and a Cosmos 2361 satellite passed extremely close to each other at an altitude of 984 kilometres.
According to space technology company LeoLabs, if those two objects had collided, it could have resulted in a “worst-case scenario” where an out-of-control collision would cause a ripple effect that would lead to more collisions, eventually causing thousands of pieces of space debris that could persist for decades and make space exploration more difficult.
In the background of this growing space junk threat, Reuters reported that the US government is attempting to set new space hygiene norms while private companies are investing in ways to tackle the messy environment above our skies.
Towards this end, the US Space Command released a formal list of what it proclaims as responsible space behaviours. This wide-ranging report included a section on space debris that urges space exploration stakeholders to dispose defunct satellites safely or to notify other operators if their spacecraft might pose a debris hazard.
“The idea is we hope our adversaries do the same. You have to find a way to allow the economy to grow in the space domain, and in order to do that you need to make sure that it remains sustainable,” said Brigadier General Richard Zellmann, deputy director of the command’s operations unit, to Reuters at the time.
