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The International Space Station. NASAThis morning, the three astronauts aboard the International Space Station pulled a Sandra Bullock. Well, not quite—they weren’t captured outside their craft, pummeled by debris, and sent adrift into space with only their wits and a dwindling oxygen supply to save them. But this is (hopefully) as close as real astronauts will ever get to that situation.Around 6:30 AM Eastern, mission control notified the crew that a piece of debris from an old Russian weather satellite was heading their way, scheduled to whiz by the station at 8:01 AM. Normally, the ISS would get a bigger heads-up about incoming space debris. But this time it wasn’t prepared to move out of the way. So instead, the crew—including Commander Gennady Padalka, Scott Kelly, and Mikhail Kornienko—hid out in the Soyuz spacecraft docked to the station, ready to abandon ship if the space shrapnel came too close.This is the fourth time in history the ISS crew has had to jump in the Soyuz for protection (it’s less likely that debris will hit the relatively small, hidden capsule) and potential evacuation. The amount of trash floating around in low Earth orbit is a constant threat to the station. “We follow space debris all the time, but most of it falls outside the imaginary protective box that we put around the station,” says NASA spokesperson Kyle Herring.Since its launch in 1998, the station has had to maneuver out of the way of debris 22 times. It even has a new predetermined avoidance maneuver in place for just these situations, which will kick off a thruster to slightly change the station’s orbit at the push of a button.Today, though, there wasn’t enough time for that maneuver to make a difference, so the crew just hunkered down, closing themselves inside the Soyuz and counting down the minutes until the debris’ closest approach. That was after an hour and a half of quickly taking steps to protect the station as best they could, sealing off the separate modules to contain the damage if the debris hit only part of the station.Luckily, the satellite debris didn’t come into contact with the ISS. Mission control sent the all-clear minutes after the debris had passed, and the astronauts are now back in the station, in the process of reconfiguring it for normal operations. Ryan Stone would be proud. Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.
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