A piece of space debris hit the rebotic arm on the International Space Station (ISS), but near-term operations should not be affected, according to the agencies involved.
The impact to Canadarm2, first noticed by NASA and the Canadian Space Agency during a routine inspection on May 12, punched a hole in the arm boom and its thermal blanket, according to CNN.
In a blog post on Friday, The Canadian Space Agency said there are over 23,000 objects the size of a softball or larger being tracked 24/7 to detect potential collisions with satellites and the ISS. CSA also pointed out that a number of tiny objects, ranging from rock or dust particles to flecks of paint from satellites, are just too small to be monitored.
“The threat of collisions is taken very seriously. NASA has a long-standing set of guidelines to ensure the safety of the Station crew. The safety of astronauts onboard the orbiting laboratory remains the top priority of all Station partners,” says the CSA.
Canadarm2 was scheduled soon to move a Canadian robotic hand, Dextre, into a spot to replace a faulty power switch box called the Remote Power Control module, according to Live Science, but that operation should not be affected by the incident. Both Canadarm2 and Dextre are usually operated from CSA headquarters near Montreal, Quebec.
Incident puts dangers of orbital debris back in the spotlight
Orbital debris in low-Earth orbit is a growing concern, especially with the huge numbers of CubeSat launches of fleets of small satellites for broadband service and other applications. SpaceX now sends batches of Starlinks to space almost every week, with the last launch occurring on Wednesday, May 26.
And keep in mind that low-Earth orbit is more protective to the astronauts than if they were living in deep space, but they are still exposed to some of the dangers of life in the space environment – like space junk.
In 2013, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield tweeted about a “bullet hole” mishap. “Bullet hole — a small stone from the universe went through our solar array,” Hadfield wrote in April 2013, suspecting the hole was caused by a tiny space rock called a micrometeoroid. “Glad it missed the hull.”
And on April 23, this year, a SpaceX Crew Dragon Spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency and Akihiko Hoshide from Japan launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
In route to the ISS, the crew was actually warned by ground control the spacecraft could be at risk of colliding with a piece of orbital debris. However, the danger passed when tracking revealed the object was farther away than anticipated, reports local CBS affiliate CBS4.
