A Russian space suit loaded with junk floats away from the International Space Station earlier in 2006 (Image: NASA)
NASA is proposing a new policy of throwing unwanted objects off the increasingly cramped International Space Station (see Astronauts to pitch unwanted gear off space station).
But space travellers already have some experience pitching gear from the ISS.
In 2005, NASA astronaut Bill McArthur ejected a device called the Floating Potential Probe, which measures electrical charge around the station, because NASA officials were concerned it might come off the station on its own (see Spacewalk removes shaky experiment from station). It stayed in space for 110 days after its release.
Advertisement
Then on 3 February 2006, a Russian space suit loaded with trash was released from the ISS. SuitSat-1, nicknamed Ivan Ivanovich, was equipped with a radio transmitter and batteries. It orbited Earth for 216 days, making it the longest-lived piece of debris from the ISS (see Announcement of SuitSat’s death premature).
The station also sheds debris unintentionally, losing about four trackable objects – the size of a grapefruit or larger – per year. That is significantly less than the space junk released by the former Soviet Union’s Salyut 7 and Mir space stations.
Mir, which launched in 1986 and was deliberately de-orbited in 2001, released 22 objects a year, while the older Salyut 7, launched in 1982 and de-orbited in 1991, averaged about 33 trackable pieces of space debris annually.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
