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Space Station Dodges Orbital Junk

August 28th, 2008
Author Tariq Malik

» Space Station Dodges Orbital Junk

The International Space Station fired its rocket engines to dodge space junk for the first time in five years on Wednesday.

According to a daily NASA status report, the European-built cargo ship Jules Verne docked at the station’s aft end fired its rocket engines in a 5-minute, 2-second maneuver to avoid the potential collision with a piece of orbital trash. The last time the station performed the so-called “Debris Avoidance Maneuver” was on May 30, 2003, the report added.

The offending piece of space hardware: Object #33246, part of a Russian satellite formerly known as Kosmos-2421.

An illustration of the Kosmos-2421 satellite. Credit: NASA Orbital Debris Program.

NASA projections predicted that, without the avoidance maneuver, the space station and chunk of orbital debris would likely pass silently by each other with just under a mile (1.627 km) of clearance between them. The probability of an impact: 0.0139 (That’s 1-in-72 chance odds, according to NASA, if you’re counting).

Mission requirements call for an avoidance maneuver if there’s a greater than 1-in-10,000 chance that a piece of orbital debris could collide with the space station.

For you rocket hounds, the unmanned Jules Verne cargo ship - Europe’s first Automated Transfer Vehicle - fired two of its four rocket thrusters at 12:11 p.m. EDT (1611 GMT) on Wednesday to put some more elbow room between the station and Kosmos-2421 remnant. Jules Verne is due to undock from the aft end of the station’s Russian-built Zvezda service module on Sept. 5.

And if you’re still interested, if Kosmos-2421 (also known as Cosmos-2421) was a Russian Navy electronic ocean surveillance satellite that apparently shut down and began breaking apart earlier this March, according to NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office.

As of June, the satellite had undergone three different fragmentation events that left a total of 500 or more bits of debris floating around an orbit 242-257 miles (390-415 km) above Earth. The space station typically flies in an orbit about 220 miles (354 km) above Earth.