The space station just had to steer clear of more space junk

The International Space Station orbiting about 250 miles above Earth. NASA

The International Space Station (ISS) had to steer clear of a piece of space junk on Monday — the second such maneuver that the orbital outpost has had to make in a week.

“The ISS is orbiting slightly higher today after the docked Progress 89 cargo craft fired its engines for three-and-a-half minutes early Monday,” NASA said in a post on its website. “The debris avoidance maneuver positioned the orbital outpost farther away from a satellite fragment nearing the station’s flight path.”

The space agency didn’t offer any details regarding the size of the piece of junk.

The burn raised the facility’s orbit by around 1,650 feet (500 meters), according to media reports, putting the ISS and its seven crew members a safe distance away from the approaching debris.

The ISS orbits Earth at about 250 miles up at a speed of around 17,000 mph, so a collision with a large piece of orbiting debris, which could be a spent rocket part, a defunct satellite, or fragments of either, could be catastrophic for the space station and those aboard it. With such high speeds involved, a collision with even a tiny fragment could puncture a hole in the facility, causing potentially serious issues for the station’s crew members.

A couple of years ago, an emergency event resulted in the ISS astronauts being ordered to seek shelter in their docked spaceships after a piece of junk was spotted heading close to the station. Fortunately, a direct hit didn’t occur and the crew was able to return to normal duties a short while later.

The station relies on a network of ground-based and space-based systems for tracking and avoiding potentially hazardous junk floating in low-Earth orbit. Up until the summer of last year, the ISS had carried out a total of 37 avoidance maneuvers since it began operations 24 years ago.

“Low-Earth orbit is now viewed as the world’s largest garbage dump, and it’s expensive to remove space debris from low-Earth orbit because the problem of space junk is huge — there are close to 6,000 tons of materials [out there],” NASA said last year.

To deal with the increasingly troublesome issue, a number of commercial companies have been exploring ways to clear te debris, though no single system has yet emerged as an efficient method for tackling the problem.