ISS swerves to avoid Russian space debris

NASA postponed a spacewalk outside the International Space Station early yesterday morning, and Russian space junk is to blame.

👩‍🚀 Here’s what happened: Two US astronauts were – and we don’t use this word lightly – literally about to step out of the space station’s airlock to install external solar arrays, when the mission’s ground control team radioed them to halt. Immediately.

The space station then proceeded to perform an emergency maneuver, firing its thrusters for 10+ minutes to successfully avoid an 11-foot piece of debris from a Russian spacecraft hurtling through space at ~17,500 mph.

💥Zoom out: Space debris is a growing problem for satellites, spacecraft, and NASA astronauts. Simply put, things orbiting Earth move pretty fast – between 15,700 mph and 17,500 mph – and as you can probably imagine, collisions at those speeds aren’t too pretty. A number of windows on space shuttles and the ISS have even had to be replaced due to damage caused by paint flecks (!).

• More than 27,000 pieces of space debris are currently tracked by the DOD’s global Space Surveillance Network (SSN) sensors.
• And muchhhhh more exists that can’t be traced. In fact, untraceable millimeter-sized orbital debris represents the highest mission-ending risk to most robotic spacecraft operating in low Earth orbit, according to NASA.