Nine astronauts on the space station briefly moved to their docked return spacecraft late Wednesday as a satellite broke up in low Earth orbit.The procedure was a"precautionary measure", NASA officials added, stating that the crew only stayed in their spacecraft for about an hour before they were"cleared to exit their spacecraft, and the station resumed normal operations.
NASA did not specify which satellite was associated with the incident, but satellite monitoring and collision detection firm LeoLabs identified a"debris-generating event" that same evening."Early indications are that a non-operational Russian spacecraft, Resurs-P1 SATNO 39186, released a number of fragments," the companythat over 100 pieces of trackable debris were generated.
The amount of space debris in orbit generally is a growing concern. The North American Aerospace Defense Command is tracking more than 45,300 space objects overall as of today, to monitor the area around the ISS. The space station is typically tasked to move if any trackable pieces roughly 2 inches in size come within a"pizza box"-shaped area of space surrounding the ISS orbit. That box is roughly 2.
NASA procedures also dictate that astronauts may shelter in their return spacecraft if the hazard, typically a very tiny one in statistical terms, brings a chance of needing to evacuate the ISS. This happened, for example, after RussiaThe new NASA update did not specify how close the satellite pieces came to the ISS. LeoLabs stated the debris event it was monitoring released fragments between 9:05 a.m. EDT and 8:51 p.m. EDT Wednesday .
Education Education Latest News, Education Education Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: SPACEdotcom - 🏆 92. / 67 Read more »