Space station ‘debris avoidance’

The International Space Station (ISS) performed a “Pre-Determined Debris Avoidance Maneuver” to increase its distance away from a fragment of a Russian satellite.

NASA said in a post on its website that the ISS’s thrusters fired for just more than five minutes on Monday to provide an “extra measure of distance” from a fragment of debris from the Russian Cosmos 1408, a Soviet satellite launched in 1982 that operated for around two years.

A Russian anti-satellite test last November destroyed the satellite, generating a large cloud of debris, according to NASA. The cloud included about 1,500 pieces large enough to be tracked.