Ashish Ranjan
ISS undertakes emergency boost to avoid space collision: Monday, the International Space Station (ISS), which orbits 400 kilometres above Earth, had to rev its engine to reorient its path away from an Earth-imaging satellite in order to avoid a collision.
“Monday morning, the space station manoeuvred out of the path of an Earth observation satellite. To evade the approaching satellite, the docked ISS Progress 83 resupply ship fired its engines for approximately six minutes, slightly increasing the station’s orbit “NASA published a blog entry.
The US agency also clarified that the new orbital trajectory of the International Space Station will have no effect on the impending launch of the Crew 5 mission.
Orbital decay: the Satellogic constellation is only one of a number of Earth observing constellations with multiple satellites entering the ISS orbital height regime. Im magenta, Nusat-17 which was the cause of yesterday's ISS dodge manuever pic.twitter.com/OM0mcToe0p
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) March 7, 2023
Later in the day, the four-person crew is scheduled to return to Earth aboard the SpaceX Dragon Endurance spacecraft. NASA tweeted on Thursday, “Crew 5 has worked on more than a hundred diverse ISS research experiments during their five-month stay on the space station, from exploring quantum mechanics to growing space tomatoes.”
How frequently does the ISS alter its course to avoid collisions?
Since 1999, the International Space Station has made 32 course corrections in order to avoid satellites and trackable space debris. In order to avoid the Cosmos 1408 satellite debris that Russia destroyed during an anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons demonstration in November 2021, two such corrections were required in the previous year, according to Space.com.
What caused ISS to alter its course?
NASA did not specify which satellite caused the International Space Station to deviate, but experts believe it was the Argentinian earth observation satellite Nusat-17. “Orbital decay: the Satellogic constellation is one of a number of Earth observation constellations with multiple satellites entering the orbital height regime of the International Space Station. Im magenta, Nusat-17, which prompted yesterday’s ISS manoeuvre to avoid it “In a social media post, Dr. Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, stated the following.
