Space junk forces astronauts to evacuate station

[Guest ABC News]

This is a news story however it isn't really to do with flying but I thought interesting anyway - Admin

 

A tiny piece of space junk smaller than a fingertip has forced three astronauts to briefly evacuate the International Space Station when the debris came too close for comfort.

 

The astronauts, Russian Yury Lonchakov and Americans Michael Fincke and Sandra Magnus, spent about nine minutes in the Soyuz escape ship before the space litter passed by.

 

NASA called the threat to the $US100 billion space station "minimal" and said the astronauts were moved into the Soyuz capsule as a precaution.

 

The debris was a "very tiny piece" - about 1 centimetre long - of an old payload assist motor that was previously on either a Delta rocket or the space shuttle, said NASA spokeswoman Laura Rochon.

 

"The crew is safe and back in the space station and they are resuming normal operations," she said.

 

Being in the escape craft would have allowed the astronauts to "quickly depart the station in the unlikely event the debris collided with the station causing a depressurisation," NASA said in a statement.

 

Warnings of the close encounter came too late for flight controllers to manoeuvre the station out of the way.

 

Space junk is considered a threat to the estimated 800 or so commercial and military satellites operating in space as well as to the space station, which has been continuously manned since November 2000.

 

There are more than 18,000 pieces of space debris catalogued.

 

High-speed litter

 

Small pieces of junk can pose a danger to the space station and the shuttle because of the speed at which they move.

 

Pieces as small as a fleck of paint, hurtling along at about 27,360kph have damaged the shuttle's windows.

 

The crash between a US satellite and a defunct Russian military satellite over northern Siberia in February created more than 500 pieces of new space debris to be tracked by the US Strategic Command, the arm of the Pentagon that monitors space junk.

 

The first of those pieces was expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere overnight.

 

As a result of that accident, NASA calculated the chance of a catastrophic impact with orbital debris had been increased by 6 per cent, to one in 318, for the next shuttle mission.

 

Thursday's incident occurred a day after NASA postponed until Sunday the scheduled launch of shuttle Discovery on a mission to the space station, because of a hydrogen leak during fuelling.

 

 

 

[winsor68]

Has any one heard of a something in the news a few years back on something called the "Cascade Effect" (I think)....Theory being that if there was a major accident in space the millions of pieces of debris would potentially ground all space operations overnight????