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The International Space Station had to fire its thrusters for 5 minutes and 5 seconds to dodge the debris from the Russian Cosmos 1408 satellite, according to NASA. The satellite was blown apart in 2021 by Russia as part of an anti-satellite attack test.
“This evening, the International Space Station’s Progress 81 thrusters fired for 5 minutes, 5 seconds in a Pre-Determined Debris Avoidance Maneuver (PDAM) to provide the complex an extra measure of distance away from the predicted track of a fragment of Russian Cosmos 1408 debris,” said the NASA statement. According to the space agency, the firing of the thruster did not affect normal space station operations.
The Russian anti-satellite test was conducted on November 14, 2021, and it created more than 1,500 pieces of space junk. At the time, many space agencies and others had condemned the test, with US Space command chief Army General James Dickinson saying at the time that it “will continue to pose a threat to activities in outer space for years to come, putting satellites and space missions at risk, as well as forcing more collision avoidance maneuvers,” according to Reuters.
Anti-satellite tests are nothing new. The United States conducted the first such test in 1959 when satellites were fairly new technology and much rarer. On March 27, 2019, India conducted its own anti-satellite test when it used a surface-to-air missile to bring down a satellite.
According to Reuters, experts say that the testing of anti-satellite weapons will pose a space hazard by creating clouds of fragments that will then collide with other objects, setting off a chain of reactions that will fill Earth’s orbit with many different fast-moving projectiles.
Earlier this month, the space station got its latest residents when NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina flew to it as part of a NASA-SpaceX Crew-5 mission.
