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International Space Station shifts orbit to prevent collision with space debris

2015-05-13 29 Dailymotion

Originally published March 18, 2014<br /><br />The International Space Station shifted its route to avoid colliding with an incoming piece of space junk, NASA officials said on Monday (March 18).<br /><br />The space station fired its onboard thrusters on Sunday, raising its orbit by 1km to prevent colliding into a large fragment broken from a 1979 Russian weather satellite. The station is coated with a thin shielding that can only sustain collisions with fragments below 1 cm in diameter.<br /><br />Mission Control says that the station's position change would not affect the launch taking off from Kazakhstan next week.<br /><br />Broken satellites and discarded rocket boosters contribute to the tens of millions of pieces of space debris circulating in the earth's orbit. These floating fragments pose a major threat to current and future space missions.

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