03-13-2009, 12:19 AM
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/arti...QD96SPN280
WASHINGTON (AP) — The near-hit of space junk Thursday was a warning shot fired 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.
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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.
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The object likely was a "yo weight" used to stabilize a global positioning satellite placed in orbit in 1993, McDowell and Matney said. It is ejected when the satellite is in its proper position.
NASA spokesman Byerly said station crews have used Soyuz as a precaution five times because of debris. But NASA space junk expert Matney said he couldn't it recall ever being used because of space debris.