The Worldwide Area Station (ISS) was compelled to maneuver out of the best way of an Earth-imaging satellite tv for pc that was instantly in its path.
Thrusters on the Progress 83 resupply vessel docked on the ISS, had been fired for just a little greater than six minutes to boost the station’s orbit and forestall a collision.
The Argentinian Earth-observation satellite tv for pc, launched in 2020, Nusat-17, is operated by the geospatial knowledge firm Satellogic. Dr. Jonathan McDowell, astronomer and astrophysicist on the Harvard–Smithsonian Middle for Astrophysics, tweeted the Nusat constellation is one in every of a number of whose orbits are slowly encroaching on the ISS’s orbit.
Maneuvers to keep away from collision with ISS is rare because the house station has already made a complete 32 course corrections to keep away from satellites and trackable house particles since 1999, in keeping with a 2022 NASA report.
Simply final 12 months two path corrections had been made by the ISS to keep away from particles flying from the Cosmos 1408 satellite tv for pc, which Russia destroyed in an anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons take a look at in November 2021, Area reported.
This time the station acquired preliminary alerts for the potential collision roughly 30 hours forward of the satellite tv for pc’s projected closest strategy.
