NASA says space station safe from debris
CAPE CANAVERAL (AP) – NASA gave the all-clear to the international space station Monday, telling its astronauts they would not need to steer away from an orbiting piece of satellite junk.
Experts had been keeping close tabs on the debris all day, at one point believing it might pass within a half-mile of the space station Tuesday, just ahead of the shuttle Discovery’s arrival.
But as they studied the path of the small debris from an old busted-up Soviet satellite, engineers ascertained it would remain at a safe distance.
A maneuver by the space station would have forced Discovery, which is delivering one last set of solar wings, to adjust its course for docking late Tuesday afternoon.
Mission Control radioed up the good news to both space crews early Monday evening.
“That makes things easier for (the station) and for us as well,” Mission Control told the shuttle astronauts.
On Thursday, the three space station residents had to move into their emergency getaway capsule because another piece of space junk came uncomfortably close at 220 miles above Earth. In that case, there was short notice and the astronauts did not have enough time to steer out of the way.
LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team, said the back-to-back debris threats were random.
Flight director Paul Dye also was not reading too much into the recent flurry of debris events. Besides last week’s close call, a two-satellite wreck in a much higher orbit last month also spotlighted the growing problem of space junk.
“We seem to have a bit more than we’ve had in the past,” Dye said Monday evening. “It’s a little bit like traffic on the freeway. Sometimes it’s bad and sometimes it’s not, and sometimes you can figure out why and sometimes you’re not sure where it came from.”
To be safe, NASA never wants anything straying into an imaginary box around the space station that measures just over one mile by 15 miles by 15 miles. The 4-inch debris being tracked Monday was going to be “in the fringes of that,” Dye said.
The odds of a hit have to be better than 1-in-100,000 to be of concern, Dye said. NASA has moved the space station to dodge debris eight times, most recently in August. Generally, engines on the Russian living quarters or the attached Russian supply ships are fired to alter the path of the entire station. It’s a relatively easy job, but uses up precious fuel.
The debris this time was from a Soviet military satellite called Kosmos 1275, which broke up shortly after its 1981 launch. Russians believe a battery explosion did the satellite in, resulting in a cloud of 310 pieces of debris.