The International Space Station(ISS) performed a brief manoeuvre to dodge a fragment of a defunct Chinese satellite, Russian space agency Roscosmos said. On November 12, 2021, a fragment of the Fengyun-1C spacecraft will approach the International Space Station at about 4 am Moscow time, Roscosmos added.

The station crewed by seven astronauts climbed 1,240 metres higher to avoid a close encounter with the fragment and settled in an orbit 470.7 km (292 miles) above the Earth, Roscosmos said. It did not say how large the debris was.

“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 adding that the minimum distance between the object and the ISS was just over 600 meters.

An ever-swelling amount of space debris is threatening satellites hovering around Earth, making insurers leery of offering coverage to the devices that transmit texts, maps, videos and scientific data.

Over the station’s 23-year orbital lifetime, there have been about 30 close encounters with orbital debris requiring evasive action. Three of these near-misses occurred in 2020. In May this year there was a hit: a tiny piece of space junk punched a 5mm hole in the ISS’s Canadian-built robot arm.

This week’s incident involved a piece of debris from the defunct Fengyun-1C weather satellite, destroyed in 2007 by a Chinese anti-satellite missile test. The satellite exploded into more than 3,500 pieces of debris, most of which are still orbiting. Many have now fallen into the ISS’s orbital region.

To avoid the collision, a Russian Progress supply spacecraft docked to the station fired its rockets for just over six minutes. This changed the ISS’s speed by 0.7 metres per second and raised its orbit, already more than 400km high, by about 1.2km.

Orbit is getting crowded Space debris has become a major concern for all satellites orbiting the Earth, not just the football-field-sized ISS. As well as notable satellites such as the smaller Chinese Tiangong space station and the Hubble Space Telescope, there are thousands of others.

As the largest inhabited space station, the ISS is the most vulnerable target. It orbits at 7.66 kilometres a second, fast enough to travel from Perth to Brisbane in under eight minutes.