Space station forced to avoid orbiting debris once again

THE International Space Station had to swerve to avoid a fragment of debris yesterday, the head of the Russian space agency said, the latest in a series of such incidents.

Calls to monitor and regulate the debris, also called space junk, have grown since Russia carried out an antisatellite missile test last month. This generated a debris field in orbit that US officials said would pose a hazard to space missions for years.

Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, said that on this occasion the debris was from a US launch vehicle sent into orbit in 1994.

Mr Rogozin said that mission control had to adjust the space station’s orbit by 310 metres for nearly three minutes to avoid a close encounter.

The unscheduled manoeuvre would not affect the planned launch of a Soyuz MS-20 rocket on Dec 8 from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan or its planned docking with the ISS, he added.

Space debris consists of discarded launch vehicles or parts of a spacecraft that float around in space. They risk colliding with satellites or the ISS.

‘Unless we change course, the opportunities of space to improve our lives could be closed off for generations’

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former secretary-general of Nato, said that Russia’s destruction of its satellite last month risked turning space into a junkyard.

“Unless we change course, the opportunities of space to improve our lives on Earth could be closed off for generations,” he wrote in an opinion piece in the Financial Times.

Space debris also forced Nasa to postpone a spacewalk to replace a faulty antenna on the ISS on Tuesday.

Last month, the space station had to perform a brief manoeuvre to dodge a fragment of a defunct Chinese satellite.

In separate comments yesterday, Roscosmos said that it hoped Bill Nelson, the Nasa adminstrator, would visit Russia in the first half of next year to discuss further cooperation on the space station project.