ENDEAVOUR DETOURS AROUND JUNK.Byline: The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times The space shuttle space shuttle, reusable U.S. space vehicle. Developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), it consists of a winged orbiter, two solid-rocket boosters, and an external tank. Endeavour made an unexpected maneuver Friday around a piece of space junk, illustrating the increased vigilance required to avoid a growing amount of space debris Space debris or orbital debris, also called space junk and space waste, are the objects in orbit around Earth created by humans, that no longer serve any useful purpose. . The Endeavour, which was launched Thursday with a crew of six on a nine-day satellite retrieval mission, fired steering thrusters to slow its speed slightly so that it avoided passing too close to an abandoned Air Force satellite, said officials of the NASA NASA: see National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA in full National Aeronautics and Space Administration Independent U.S. . Col. Brian Duffy Brian Duffy, Retired Colonel, USAF (b. June 20 1953, Boston, Massachusetts) is a former NASA astronaut. Personal data Married to the former Janet M. Helms of West Lafayette, Indiana. They have two children. He enjoys golf, running, and reading. His mother, Mrs. of the Air Force, the mission commander, received a two and a half hour warning from Mission Control in Houston that the shuttle would pass within four-fifths of a mile of the 350-pound satellite if no changes were made in the Endeavour's orbit 290 miles above the Earth. An hour after the warning, Duffy used the thrusters to slow the shuttle by 4 feet per second, enough to widen the passing distance between the two spacecraft to six miles. The Air Force lost contact with the satellite, designed to track ballistic missiles, about a year and a half ago. NASA officials said that the crew was in no danger, and that a collision was unlikely even without the emergency maneuver. But agency flight safety rules say a shuttle can fly no closer than 1.3 miles above, below or beside another orbiting object. "It wasn't any big deal for us," Duffy said in an interview with Cable Network News. "There are a lot of things in orbit, in space. We know where they are." In 74 missions, the space shuttles The term Space Shuttles refers to partly or fully reusable launch vehicles for regularly placing payloads into low earth orbit. See:
adj. 1. Occurring as or resulting from coincidence. 2. Happening or existing at the same time. co·in , the Endeavour was the last shuttle to change its orbit to avoid a possible collision, in June of 1993, with Duffy as pilot. Dr. Donald J. Kessler, NASA's senior scientist for orbital debris studies at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in an interview that space junk was a growing problem threatening the safety of spacecraft and astronauts. The Air Force tracks more than 7,000 pieces of debris larger than a baseball, including old rocket parts, outmoded satellites, discarded tools, remnants of explosions, and other odds and ends moving in orbit at more than 17,000 miles per hour. |
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