Moscow. November 10th. INTERFAX - The International Space Station conducted a maneuver on Wednesday to avoid a collision with a fragment of a Chinese weather satellite, Roscosmos reported.
"The height of the orbit of the International Space Station was increased on Wednesday evening to avoid a collision with "space debris". According to preliminary data, after the maneuver, the height of the ISS orbit increased by about 1.2 km," the state corporation reported.
Earlier on Wednesday, Roscosmos reported that a fragment of the Chinese weather satellite Fengyun-1C will approach the ISS on Friday night, around 4 am.
According to the state corporation, the chip should fly at a distance of 600 meters from the station. To avoid "space debris", MCC specialists calculated an orbit correction maneuver, after which its height should increase by 1240 meters.
In April 2019, TsNIIMash reported that the ISS had to evade space debris 25 times during its existence. The minimum distance at which space debris turned out to be from the station is 720 meters.
In 2020, the ISS conducted two maneuvers to avoid debris - in July and September.
Earlier, the chief designer of the Space Monitoring System, Vitaly Goryuchkin, told Interfax that the situation with space debris could become critical in the next 10 years.
On August 4, Roscosmos reported that the total weight of space debris in orbit exceeds 7 thousand tons. According to the state corporation, every day the automated warning system for dangerous situations in near-Earth space receives from three to ten messages about the approaches of Russian spacecraft with potentially dangerous objects.
