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Unfolding Stories
Space junk, not meteorites, remains biggest threat to spacecraft
Russian announced on Wednesday a February mission to the International Space Station to pick up crew members left stranded after a strike damaged the capsule that was to take them home.
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An illustration of NASA’s DART spacecraft and the Italian Space Agency’s (ASI) LICIACube prior to impact at the Didymos binary system. (Reuters/NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben/)
D
odging the kind of meteorite strike that forced Russia to plan a space station rescue mission is nearly impossible, yet the greater threat to spacecraft is actually the man-made debris in orbit, experts say.
Russian announced on Wednesday a February mission to the International Space Station to pick up crew members left stranded after a strike damaged the capsule that was to take them home.
Didier Schmitt, the European Space Agency's head of human and robotic exploration, said it was not rare for tiny meteorites to hit the space station.
The micrometeorites can be traveling at speeds from 10 to 30 kilometres (6-18 miles) a second -- "much faster than a shotgun bullet," Schmitt said.
That is why, when the space station's large observation window is not in use, it is shuttered with "very, very thick layers of protective materials," he said.
The small meteorites come from so far away in the distant universe and at such high speeds that they cannot realistically be tracked, he said.
But space agencies do monitor known meteor showers, such as one expected in early August.
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