NASA delays planned ISS spacewalk due to risk of space junk

Sad news for those who plan to watch Spacewalk scheduled NASA at the International Space Station today, because it has been postponed. Spacewalk, which is expected to begin today at 7:10 a.m., postponed at the last minute, thanks to the detection of the closest room debris. Unfortunately for us, NASA doesn’t know when it will be able to do spacewalk and it will not have more details about debris and only a threat like what is owned.

Spacewalk’s plan was postponed at 11 o’clock

Astronaut Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron (the picture below) is scheduled to participate in this spacewalk today, which will see them replace the S-band antenna installed on the port 1 truss structure from the ISS. While NASA said that the meantten antenna “recently lost its ability to send signals to earth,” this problem only has a “limited impact” on the ISS function. However, NASA wants to replace the antenna to have a communication redundancy if another antenna goes down.

NASA blocked a large amount of time for Marshburn and Barron to do their spacewalk and complete antenna replacement, by saying that space was intended to last six and a half hours. Unfortunately, last night, NASA received a notification of debris from the International Space Station, pushing him to delay Spacewalk.

For now, we don’t know when Spacewalk will happen. In the announcement published today, NASA said that space will be postponed “until more information is available.” Because this mission is more about maintaining redundancy in the ISS communication system rather than improving important components, no major rush to replace the antenna, so that NASA can take all the time needed to ensure that Marshburn and Barron will not have to compete with spacecraft waste when They carry out their mission.

Debris of space on everyone’s mind

Debris in the low-debris in the Low Orbit of the Earth has become a large topic of discussion this month, thank you not only at the delay in this spaceship but also because of the Russian anti-satellite missiles tested earlier in November. On November 15, 2021, Russia destroyed the old cosmos-1408 satellite was inactive, creating a debris cloud that has the potential to place the ISS crew and the station itself is at risk.

The United States Army command estimates that the explosion creates at least 1,500 debris from the debris can be tracked and thousands of others who cannot be printed. The agency also said that the cloud of debris could linger in low orbits for “years and potentially for decades.”

So far, there has been no indication of NASA that the rubble of the test is behind the delay today. The European Space Agency estimates that there are tens of thousands of objects of more than 10cm in the size of orbit, with the potential of hundreds of millions of objects smaller than that. Small objects that cannot be opened are still pose threats because they move at orbital speed, so no wonder NASA takes a serious report on debris. We will tell you when NASA has a new date for this spacewalk, along with detail for how you can watch it.