WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 (BNA) An anti-satellite missile test conducted by Russia on Monday resulted in a debris field in low Earth orbit that endangers the International Space Station and will pose a threat to space activities for years, US officials said.
The space station’s seven-member crew — four American astronauts, one German cosmonaut and two Russian cosmonauts — have been directed to hunker down in the spaceship’s docked capsules for two hours after the test as a precaution to allow quick leave if necessary, NASA said.
The research laboratory, which orbits about 250 miles (402 km) above Earth, continued to pass through or near the debris cluster every 90 minutes, but NASA specialists decided it was safe for the crew to return inside the station after the third pass, the agency said.
NASA reports that the crew has also been ordered to close the hatches of several modules of the International Space Station (ISS) for now, according to NASA.
“NASA will continue to monitor the debris in the coming days and beyond to ensure the safety of our crew in orbit,” NASA President Bill Nelson said in the statement.
Experts say testing weapons that crash satellites into orbit poses a space hazard by creating clouds of shrapnel that can collide with other objects, triggering a chain reaction of projectiles through Earth’s orbit.
The Russian military and defense ministry could not be reached for comment. A message posted on Twitter by the Russian space agency Roscosmos played down the danger.
“The orbit of the object, which today forced the crew to transfer to a spacecraft according to standard procedures, moved away from the orbit of the International Space Station,” the Russian space agency Roscosmos wrote on Twitter. The station is in the green zone.
The US Space Command said in a statement that an anti-satellite missile launched by Russia at one of its satellites has generated more than 1,500 pieces of “trackable orbital debris” and is likely to produce hundreds of thousands of smaller fragments.
“Russia has demonstrated a willful disregard for the long-term security, safety, stability and sustainability of the space domain of all nations,” said US Space Command Commander General James Dickinson.
He said debris from the missile test “will continue to pose a threat to activities in outer space for years to come, compromising satellites and space missions, as well as imposing further collision avoidance maneuvers.”
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken condemned the missile test as “reckless and irresponsible”. At the Pentagon, spokesman John Kirby said the test showed the need to establish a code of conduct in space.
“It is inconceivable that Russia would endanger not only American and international astronauts on the International Space Station, but also their own cosmonauts,” Nelson said. He said the debris cloud also posed a threat to a separate Chinese space station under construction and to the three-man “astronaut” crew aboard that outpost.
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The accident came just four days after the latest group of four astronauts on the space stations — American Raga, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron of NASA and fellow European Space Agency crew member Matthias Maurer of Germany — arrived on the orbital platform to begin a six-month science mission.
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They were greeted by three crew members of the space station who were already on board – the American cosmonaut Mark Vande and the Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov.
“Thanks for the crazy but well-coordinated day. We really appreciated all the awareness of the situation you gave us,” Vande Hei said in a Monday radio broadcast to NASA Online via Space.com. “It was definitely a great way to bond as a crew, to start our first day in space.”
The space station, which spans the size of an American football field from start to finish, has been continuously occupied since November 2000, and is operated by an international partnership of five space agencies from 15 countries, including Russia’s Roscosmos.
Russia is not the first country to conduct anti-satellite experiments in space. The first US performance was in 1959, when satellites were scarce and new.
In April, Russia conducted another anti-satellite missile test as officials said space would become an increasingly important area of warfare.
In 2019, India dropped one of its satellites into low Earth orbit with an Earth-to-space missile.
These tests have raised questions about the long-term sustainability of space operations essential to a wide range of businesses, from telecommunications and weather forecasting to banking and GPS.
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