United States: The International Space Station (ISS) will continue to operate until 2030, and NASA plans to bring it down safely in the Pacific Ocean in early 2031.
For this reason, NASA is planning to build a spacecraft that will be able to guide the space station towards controlled destruction when its useful life is over.
Since 2000, there have been crews on board the ISS. It has been in orbit since 1998. Five space agencies including the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the European Space Agency (ESA), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Russia's Roscosmos worked together to build it. The institution's Microgravity Laboratory has hosted more than 3,000 research investigations.
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Radiators, trusses and modules make up the majority of the ISS. The solar panels, radiators and modules are all physically supported by the truss, which serves as the station's framework.
The modules provide habitable space for the astronauts on board, access ports to dock and undock the spacecraft, and a pressurized volume for microgravity experiments. Electricity generation is aided by solar panels and radiators.
It is estimated that the ISS will disintegrate in three stages, starting with the separation of the solar arrays and radiators, then the intact modules and truss sections, and finally the fragmentation of each individual module.
Due to the intense heating during atmospheric re-entry, most of the station's hardware is expected to burn up or vaporize.
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The South Pacific oceanic uninhabited region would be where denser parts and heat-resistant parts, such as truss sections, that are expected to survive re-entry would fall down (SPOUA). This is the area near Point Nemo, the furthest point in the ocean from land.
Several spacecraft have been destroyed, and because of its isolation, any remaining debris will not harm the land in the area.
The primary structure, which is affected by dynamic loading such as vehicle docking and undocking and orbital thermal recycling, determines how long the ISS will last. In orbit, power, environmental control, life support and communications systems can all be fixed or upgraded.
Life extension analysis must be completed for the individual modules and structures of each ISS member.
Retrograde maneuvers would begin as determined by mission controllers, gradually reducing the operational altitude of the ISS. These maneuvers can begin at different times, depending on the activity of the solar cycle and how it affects Earth's atmosphere.
Higher solar activity is probably going to make Earth's atmosphere thicker and make it harder for the ISS to move at its desired speed, resulting in more drag and loss of natural altitude.
The ISS re-entry burn, which provides the final push to lower the ISS as low as possible and ensure a safe atmospheric entry, followed by maneuvers by ISS operators to align the final target ground track and debris footprint on the SPOUA Will be done.
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The de-orbit maneuvers will be carried out with the help of the spacecraft and the propulsion system of the ISS.
The current deorbiting strategy for the space station relies on Russian Progress cargo vehicles. Of the $27.2 billion allocated for NASA in the recently released federal budget request for 2024, $180 million is designated "to initiate development of a new space tug" for deorbiting operations of the ISS.