By Eduardo Baptista
BEIJING (Reuters) -China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said on Wednesday.
An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing any new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China on Wednesday.
The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of space debris. The debris, also called space junk, consists of discarded launch vehicles or parts of a spacecraft that float around in space hundreds of miles above the Earth, risking collisions with countries’ active space assets.
The Shenzhou programme takes Chinese astronauts to and from China’s space station, Tiangong, for six-month stays where they perform a variety of tasks, including repairing damage to the station caused by debris impact.
The Shenzhou-19 crew’s return mission in April was delayed by one day due to weather conditions at the landing site. But this is the first time that a return mission has been delayed by space debris.
SPACE JUNK A GROWING HEADACHE
The rapid increase in space junk in recent years has led to growing calls for cooperation on managing space traffic.
At a forum last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping called on Chinese and Arab countries to jointly build a “space debris observation centre”.
A United Nations panel on space traffic coordination said last year that urgent action was necessary, calling for a shared database of orbital objects as well as an international framework to track and manage them.
China in 2021 complained to the UN that Tiangong had to perform two emergency avoidance manoeuvres to avoid fragments produced by Starlink satellites, owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which predominate in the Earth’s lower orbital paths.
Beijing and Washington have for years traded accusations of debris-creating behaviour.
“A certain superpower, being the first country to conduct anti-satellite weapon tests in outer space, has carried out more such tests and created more space debris than any other country,” China’s permanent mission to the UN wrote in a 2022 document, referring to the United States.
The U.S. called a Chinese anti-satellite missile test in 2007 “irresponsible” after it destroyed a satellite in polar orbit and created a massive debris field.
China has invested in technologies that could be used to reduce the risk of a space collision caused by debris.
This includes laser monitoring technology and deorbiting “sails”, which once unfolded can cause the attached spacecraft to speed up its descent into the Earth’s atmosphere, causing it to burn up without leaving space debris.
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Additional reporting by Liz Lee and Beijing newsroom; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Christian Schmollinger)
