Progress MS-20 Spaceship Cargo Ship

2022: Progress saved the ISS from colliding with space debris

The Russian cargo spacecraft Progress took International Space Station (ISS) away from space debris by correcting the height of its orbit. This was Roskosmos reported in "" on December 21, 2022.

At 16:42 Moscow time, the engines of the Progress MS-20 cargo ship were turned on: they worked for 620.6 seconds and gave an impulse of 1 m/s. As a result, the average height of the station's orbit was 417.97 km, the state corporation said in a statement.

Russian "Progress" saved the ISS from collision with space debris

Roscosmos added that during the flight, the orbit height changed 330 times. With the help of Progress engines, specialists managed to adjust the orbit 179 times.

Due to the threat of space debris, the spacewalk was canceled by the American ISS crew. Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio were to carry out installation work to upgrade the power supply system. Astronauts had to install a solar panel on the truss structure in order to improve the functioning of the ISS power supply system. On November 27, 2022, she was delivered by the cargo spacecraft Cargo Dragon. Another was mounted on December 3, 2022.

Prior to that, Sergei Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin canceled the spacewalk in connection with the detection of damage to the radiator of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked to the ISS. It was assumed that the damage could have occurred due to a collision with a micrometeorite.

Earlier, Roscosmos reported that the total weight of space debris in orbit exceeds 7 thousand tons. According to the state corporation, a daily automated warning system for dangerous situations in near-Earth space receives from 3 to 10 messages about the proximity of spacecraft of the Russian Federation with potentially dangerous objects.

On October 17, 2022, the state corporation reported on the correction of the ISS orbit to evade space debris, for this the engines of the Progress MS-20 spacecraft were also involved^[1]

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