The engines of the International Space Station’s Zvezda service module, overseen by Roscosmos, executed a crucial maneuver on Thursday to avoid potential collision with unidentified space debris.
At 11 am EDT (8:30 pm Indian time), the Zvezda module’s engines fired for 21.5 seconds, adjusting the station’s trajectory to evade an anticipated fragment of orbital debris. The operation was captured on camera by Roscosmos cosmonaut Dmitry Petelin, as shared by the Russian state-owned media TASS.
The engines were engaged at 18:00 Moscow time, providing an impulse of 0.3 m/s during the burn. The Russian space agency confirmed in a statement that the ISS’s orbit height decreased by 500 meters, leading to revised orbit parameters with a minimum altitude of 414.37 km and a maximum of 434.59 km.
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Current Occupants of the Space Station: The 68th long-term expedition crew currently inhabits the ISS, comprising Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopiev, Dmitry Petelin, and Andrey Fedyaev, NASA astronauts Francisco Rubio, Steven Bowen, and Woody Hoburg, along with UAE astronaut Sultan al-Neyadi.
The maneuver did not affect the arrival schedule of the Roscosmos Progress 85 cargo vessel or NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7 mission. The Russian Progress cargo craft successfully docked with the station’s Zvezda service module at 11:45 pm ET on Thursday (9:15 am on Friday).
However, NASA announced the postponement of the launch of a new crew of four to the space station. The launch is rescheduled for Saturday as part of SpaceX’s seventh crew rotation mission to the microgravity laboratory for the US space agency.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew 7: Dubbed as Crew-7, the mission will be led by American Jasmin Moghbeli and includes Andreas Mogensen from Denmark, Satoshi Furukawa from Japan, and Konstantin Borisov from Russia.
As part of a commercial crew program designed to reduce reliance on Russian rockets for astronaut transport post the discontinuation of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, NASA leverages Elon Musk’s SpaceX taxi service.
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