By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A disabled Russian satellite has disintegrated into more than 100 pieces of debris in orbit, forcing astronauts on the International Space Station to evacuate for about an hour and adding to the mass of space debris already in orbit in U.S. space. the agencies said.
There were no immediate details on what caused the disintegration of the Russian Earth observation satellite RESURS-P1, which was declared dead in 2022.
The US Space Command, tracking the bundle of debris, said there was no immediate threat to other satellites.
The incident occurred around 10 a.m. MST (1600 GMT) on Wednesday, the Space Command said. It occurred in orbit near the space station, prompting the American astronauts on board to shelter in their spacecraft for approximately an hour, NASA’s Space Station office said.
The Russian space agency Roscosmos, which operated the satellite, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Radars from the US space tracking firm LeoLabs detected the satellite emitting several fragments by 18:00 GMT, the company said.
The US Space Command, which has its own global network of space tracking radars, said the satellite immediately created “over 100 pieces of trackable debris”.
Large debris-generating events in orbit are rare, but of increasing concern as space becomes populated with satellite networks vital to everyday life on Earth, from broadband Internet and communications to basic navigation services such as and satellites that are no longer in use.
Russia drew strong criticism from the US and other Western countries in 2021 when it hit one of its disabled satellites in orbit with a ground-based anti-satellite (ASAT) missile launched from its Plesetsk missile site. The explosion, testing a weapons system ahead of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, created thousands of pieces of orbital debris.
In the approximately 88-minute window of RESURS-P1’s initial separation, the Plesetsk area was one of many locations on Earth that it passed, but there was no immediate indication from air or sea that Russia had launched a missile to strike the satellite. space tracker and Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell said.
“I find it hard to believe that they would use such a large satellite as an ASAT target,” McDowell said. “But with the Russians these days, who knows.”
He and other analysts speculated that the separation could have been caused by a problem with the satellite, such as fuel left on board causing an explosion.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE OLD SATELLITES
Dead satellites either remain in orbit until they descend into Earth’s atmosphere for a fiery death years later, or in much preferred—but less common—circumstances they fly into a “grave orbit” about 36,000 km from Earth for reduce the risk of an active collision. the satellites.
Roscosmos disabled RESURS-P1 due to onboard equipment failures in 2021, announcing the decision the following year. The satellite has since appeared to be descending through layers of other active satellites for eventual atmospheric reentry.
The six U.S. astronauts currently on the space station were alerted by NASA’s mission control in Houston around 9 p.m. ET Wednesday (0100 GMT Thursday) to execute “safe haven” procedures, where each crew member rushes to the spacecraft it arrived in, in case an emergency launch is required.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunni Williams boarded their Starliner spacecraft, the Boeing-built capsule that has been docked since June 6 on its first crewed test mission to the station.
Three of the other American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut boarded SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule that flew them to the station in March, while the sixth American astronaut joined the remaining two cosmonauts in their Russian Soyuz capsule that carried them there in September. last year.
The astronauts exited their spacecraft roughly an hour later and resumed their normal work on the station, NASA said.
The prospect of satellite collisions and space warfare has added urgency to calls by space lawyers and advocates for countries to create an international space traffic management mechanism, which currently does not exist.
(Editing by Andrew Heavens and Frances Kerry)