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Astronauts rush to safety as space junk whizz by
Sunday March 25, 2012 11:13:52 AM,
IANS
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Washington: Six
International Space Station (ISS) astronauts rushed to safety as a
piece of a Russian satellite whizzed by.
The astronauts orbiting 320 km above the planet were stirred from
their slumber Saturday to jump into emergency escape pods.
They were told by the ground control to scramble into two docked
Soyuz spacecrafts in case a piece of a wrecked Russian satellite
should smash into the ISS.
The emergency was called off after the chunk passed by at a
distance of about 14 km - which in space terms is a near-miss, the
Christian Science Monitor reported.
"Everything went by the book and as expected, the small piece of
cosmos satellite debris passed the international space station
without incident," said a NASA spokesman.
Ground controllers did not believe the ISS was in extreme danger,
but ordered the emergency maneuver after determining that the
trajectories could intersect.
NASA says there are about 22,000 pieces of sizable space junk -
primarily bits of old satellites - orbiting the earth.
The piece that threatened the ISS Saturday morning came from the
2009 collision of the Iridium communications satellite and the
Russian Cosmos 2251.
NASA spotted the latest threat too late for the crew to move the
ISS safely out of the way, the Monitor said.
It was the third time in 12 years that astronauts were ordered to
scramble for safety.
The astronauts - Russians Anton Shkaplerov, Anatoly Ivanishin and
Oleg Kononenko, Americans Dan Pettit and Dan Burbank, and Dutchman
Andre Kuipers - were awakened about an hour early on what was to
have been their day off to get into the Soyuz' crafts.
The spacefarers watched through the portholes to see if they could
catch a glimpse of the zooming debris. "Nichevo ... Nothing," one
of the Russian cosmonauts said.
If the 450-tonne ISS had been hit and disabled, the astronauts
were prepared to detach and descend back to earth in the capsules.
Instead, they climbed back into the ISS and "resumed a normal and
relaxing weekend", NASA spokesman Rob Navias said.
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