The crew of the international space station got a bit of a scare yesterday. The six-member crew was forced to take shelter in a Russian space craft yesterday because of a potential collision with some space junk.
Luckily the space junk didn’t impact the station. It passed within 750 feet of the station.
NASA Mission Control as describing the debris as an “unknown object of unknown size.”
The crew was in the Soyuz capsule for about a half hour, Space.com reports.
The Russian Interfax news agency, quoting a Russian space industry source, notes that approaching debris is normally detected in time to simply readjust the orbit of the space station to avoid a collision.
In today’s incident, the source tells Interfax, “the space junk was detected too late for a ducking maneuver.”
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