Space station rotates to dodge another piece of space junk

Washington - The International Space Station did an about- face rotation on Sunday in order to dodge another piece of space junk, NASA officials said.

But it was not as close a call as more than a week ago, when three station astronauts prepared to evacuate as a piece of debris approached.

In the current situation, the station was headed to a close encounter on Monday with a 10-centimetre-broad bit of debris from the upper stage of a Chinese rocket, NASA spokesman Kyle Herring told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The intent of Sunday's manoeuvre - a 180-degree turn - was to slow the station down by a tiny amount in order to steer clear of the junk on Monday, Herring said from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Herring said the rotation, which only lasted three hours, put the docked space shuttle Discovery on the leading edge of the ISS as it orbits 350 kilometres above the Earth.

Normally, the smaller Russian Soyuz spacecraft is at the front.

With Discovery and its larger surface area on the leading edge instead, the ISS orbiting speed of 27,700 kilometres an hour was slowed down enough - about 1 kilometre an hour - to avoid collision with the debris.

The station was turned around again to its normal position after the three hours.

On March 12, before the shuttle Discovery arrived, the station's three-person resident crew took refuge in the Soyuz evacuation capsule and closed the hatches after ground controllers determined that a piece of space junk was within range for a possible collision.

The nearly centimetre-long debris passed safely by the ISS. It was noticed too late for the ISS to manoevre to avoid the debris, as it did on Sunday.

The Soyuz capsule provides a quick exit from the station in case there are problems.

(www.topnews.in)