Originally published March 18, 2014
The International Space Station shifted its route to avoid colliding with an incoming piece of space junk, NASA officials said on Monday (March 18).
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.
Mission Control says that the station's position change would not affect the launch taking off from Kazakhstan next week.
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.
