A decommissioned Russian satellite has broken into more than 100 pieces of debris in orbitforcing astronauts on the International Space Station to take shelter for about an hour, adding to the mass of space debris already in the air. … space, US space agencies said.
There are no further details on the possible cause of the breakup of the Russian satellite Resurs-P1, declared out of service in 2022while the United States Space Command, in charge of tracking the debris, assured that there was no immediate threat to other satellites.
Additionally, the Russian space agency Roscosmos, which operates the satellite, did not immediately respond to Space Command’s request for comment. The event took place around 6:00 p.m. on the Iberian Peninsula and occurred in an orbit close to the space station, which forced the American astronauts on board to take shelter in your spaceship for about an houras confirmed by NASA’s Space Station.
According to LeoLabs, an American space tracking company, the satellite released several fragments up to eight hours laterwhile Space Command said the device immediately created “more than 100 pieces of trackable debris.”
Russia unleashed strong Criticism from the United States and other countries in 2021, when it struck one of its now-defunct orbiting satellites with an anti-satellite missile launched from its Plesetsk rocket base. The explosion, which was used to test a weapons system ahead of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, generated thousands of orbital debris.
In the approximately 88 minutes of RESURS-P1’s initial disintegration, the Plesetsk site was one of many places on Earth that it passed over, but There was no immediate indication from airspace or maritime alerts that Russia had launched a missile to attack the satellite, said Harvard space researcher and astronomer Jonathan McDowell.
“I find it hard to believe they would use such a large satellite as an ASAT target,” McDowell said. “But, with today’s Russians, who knows» He and other analysts speculated that the breakup could have been caused by a problem with the satellitesuch as fuel remains on board causing an explosion.
For their part, the six American astronauts currently on the space station were alerted by NASA mission control to execute “safe haven” procedures, where each crew member rushes to enter the spaceship in which they arrivedin case an emergency exit is required.
