The International Space Station Is Making An Emergency Space Junk Swerve

The International Space Station (ISS) found itself in the path of a piece of space junk this week. Without carefully calculated action, the ISS and this space junk would have the potential for a disastrous crash. To avoid the danger zone, the ISS will need to fire its engines and make itself move to a minimum distance of just over 600 meters from the junk.

The junk is a fragment of the Fengyun-1C spacecraft. This is not the first time the ISS has had to move to avoid a piece of this craft. Fengyun-1C was a weather satellite launched by China on May 10, 1999. On January 11, 2007, the PRC (People's Republic of China) destroyed the satellite as part of an ASAT (Anti-satellite) test. An ASAT kinetic-kill vehicle collided with Fengyun-1C head-on, shattering the craft into thousands of smaller pieces.

According to John V. Lambert, PhD with Cornerstone Defense, the event created over four-thousand trackable objects and an estimated forty thousand smaller untrackable objects that polluted (and largely continue to pollute) "the most valuable and highly populated low-altitude orbital regime for the foreseeable future."

Back in January of 2012 another maneuver was required to miss another bit of the exploded satellite. It's likely this 2021 move won't be the last. Fengyun-1C remains the most monstrous space junk creator in the history of human space exploration. As intentional collisions in space go, Fengyun-1C remains the leader in space debris by a long shot.

The ISS will avoid collision with the space garbage courtesy of orbit correction parameters calculated by the ballistic and navigational support service of the TsNIIMash Mission Control Center*. Their calculations will have the Progress MS-18 cargo spacecraft docking and orientation engines fire at 20:15 UTC for 361 seconds. This should give the station a momentum of 0.7 m/s, allowing the ISS orbit average altitude to increase by 1,240 m to reach 420.72 km and avoid the dangerous hunk.

*This center is part of the Automated Warning System for Dangerous Situations in near-Earth Space (ASPOS-OKP, part of ROSCOSMOS in Russia.