The International Space Station had to maneuver away from a satellite to image Earth on Monday (March 6).
At about 7:42 a.m. (12:42 GMT), the thrusters on the Progress 83 supply ship currently on the International Space Station (ISS) fired for just over six minutes, raising the station’s orbit to prevent a potential collision, according to NASA. V said blog post (Opens in a new tab).
The satellite in question appears to be an Argentine Earth observation satellite launched in 2020, according to Sandra Jones, of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. in RWhit (Opens in a new tab)Dr. Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has narrowed the possible candidates down to Nusat-17, citing the constellation’s orbital decay.
Related: International Space Station: Facts About the Orbiting Laboratory
Nusat-17 is one of ten commercial monitoring satellites launched in 2020 and operated by geospatial data company Satellogic. As McDowell pointed out in his tweet, the constellation of Noosat is one of the many orbits slowly extending beyond the orbit of the International Space Station.
Avoidance maneuvers like this aren’t entirely uncommon for the space station. according to December 2022 NASA report (Opens in a new tab)Since 1999, the International Space Station has made a total of 32 course corrections to avoid trackable satellites and space debris.
Last year, two such corrections were necessary to avoid debris from the Cosmos 1408 satellite, which Russia destroyed in an anti-satellite weapons test (ASAT) in November 2021 — an offer that has since been largely condemned by the community. international space.
Monday’s course correction came with ample notice, as NASA received initial alerts of the potential collision roughly 30 hours before the satellite’s closest approach, Jones told Space.com. A predetermined avoidance maneuver (PDAM) was calculated, and crews aboard the International Space Station along with NASA and Roscosmos ground teams prepared for the scheduled rocket burn. However, “about 20 minutes before the PDAM, a ‘green update’ was received on the coupling,” Jones said, adding, “The pushers were already enabled, so the burn was still in progress.”
Monday’s PDAM comes amid heavy International Space Station traffic, and just a few days after the arrival of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavor and members of Crew-6. Within the next week, astronauts aboard the space station will bid farewell to the Crew-5 members, scheduled for departure early Thursday (March 9), and begin preparing for the arrival of SpaceX’s CRS-27 cargo ship, currently scheduled. To launch March 14th.
The NASA blog post states that the avoidance maneuver on March 6 will not affect the upcoming Crew-5 departure. In her statement to Space.com, Jones confirmed that position, adding, “This burn does not interfere with the gradient of any incoming space station traffic.” NASA announced Wednesday afternoon that Crew-5 will depart from the International Space Station at 5:05 p.m. March 9, on a scheduled date of 9:25 p.m. March 10.
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