According to Russian space program Roscosmos, the ISS corrected its orbit to be around 1.2km higher than it had been orbiting previously.
A command was issued to fire the Progress MS-18 cargo spacecraft engines for six minutes, which was docked to the Zvezda Service Module ISS Russian segment.
Without the adjustment, Roscosmos said that a fragment of the Fengyun-1C satellite would have approached the station tomorrow morning and would have come within around 600m of the ISS.
“In order to dodge the ‘space junk’, [mission control] specialists have calculated how to correct the orbit of the International Space Station,” the agency’s statement said.
The ISS was hit by another piece of space junk in June this year, which took a chunk out of its 17m-long robotic arm.
The European Space Agency (ESA) had already published a 2021 report warning that space debris presents a problem “on a global scale”.
The amount of objects, their combined mass and their combined...