A piece of space junk originally thought to pose a threat to the International Space Station passed harmlessly by last Friday night, NASA spokesperson Robert Navias told Discovery News.
But not before Mission Control had alerted the six-member crew of the space station that they would be interrupting their sleep that night to let them know if there was any danger. There wasn't, and the astronauts got to hit the snooze button.
Still, it got us thinking about the nearly 20,000 pieces of space junk floating around in low-Earth orbit - old rocket engines, broken-down satellites and other bits of debris. Who's watching all this stuff?
NASA is, along with the United States Strategic Command and the Air Force Space Command. They track the orbits of all the space junk and - in the case of the ISS - if any of it appears to be coming within its imaginary, three-dimensional "keep out zone"...
By the time they discovered that there was a chance this chunk of trash could be heading into that too-close-for-comfort area, there wasn't enough time to move the whole station. So NASA went with plan B.
Thankfully that didn't happen.But what could a five-centimeter hunk of junk do to a massive space station?
This isn't the first time ISS crew dealt with space junk. In March, a piece of an old rocket engine actually sent the astronauts to the Soyuz. And just last week, NASA delayed the departure of a Japanese cargo ship from the ISS because of debris.
So is there any kind of way or plan to clean this stuff up?
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