Space station’s close call with junk: More to come
WASHINGTON (AP) – The near-hit of space junk Thursday was a warning fired shot across the bow of the international space station, experts said. There’s likely more to come in the future.
With less than an hour’s notice, the three astronauts were told they’d have to seek shelter in a Russian capsule parked at the space station in case a speeding piece of space junk hit Thursday.
If it hit and they were in the main part of the station, they’d have only 10 minutes of safety, Mission Control told them. A hole in the space station could mean loss of air, loss of pressure and eventual loss of life.
The crew moved so fast that they may have left their instruction manual on the other side of a closed hatch. Inside the Soyuz, they waited for 10 minutes, ready to flee to Earth if the worst happened. On the ground, space debris experts fretted.
“We were watching it with bated breath,” NASA space debris scientist Mark Matney said. “We didn’t know what was going to happen.”
The debris missed. Engineers still don’t even know by how much and may never get a good figure. It could have been a few hundred feet or a couple miles.
In space, Commander Mike Fincke said they watched out the Soyuz window.
“We didn’t see anything of course. We were wondering how close we were,” he radioed Houston.
Matney, who has been with NASA since 1992 called it the closest call he can ever remember.
But it happened a month after two satellites collided in orbit, adding several hundred pieces into the space litter belt. And in the last few years, the problem of debris in space has gotten much worse with satellites destroyed on purpose.
“It’s yet another warning shot that we really have to do something about space debris now. We have to do something on an international level,” said Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who tracks everything in orbit.
“As we continue to put stuff up there, the predictions are that the rate (of close calls) will increase,” added William Ailor, director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at the Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo, Calif.
The U.S. Space Command tracks 13,943 orbiting objects 4 inches or larger. Only about 900 of those are working satellites, McDowell said. The rest is litter. There are thousands more smaller pieces of junk that can’t be tracked as easily.
In space, size doesn’t matter too much after about 3 or 4 inches. Speed does. The object that put the scare into the space station was probably 5 inches, Matney said. McDowell figures it was even bigger, maybe a foot: “a long thin thing” with a thread or string attached.
It was traveling 5.5 miles per second – about 20,000 mph, according to NASA spokesman Josh Byerly.
At that speed, something 5 inches “will wreck your whole day,” Matney said.