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ISS crew shelters from space junk

July 16, 2015

A "close pass" by orbiting junk has forced the International Space Station's crew to scramble into its attached Soyuz capsule. It is the fourth time in ISS's 15 years that a collision risk has prompted such precautions.

https://p.dw.com/p/1G082
Internationale Raumstation ISS Sojus TMA-15M
Image: ESA/NASA/dpa

Three astronauts briefly fled the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday as a fragment of a former Soviet weather satellite flew by. They sheltered in a Soyuz spacecraft, which normally transports crew members to and from Earth.

A space industry source quoted by the Russian news agency Interfax claimed that US space monitors had spotted the space junk "very late."

That had left the ISS little time to "do an avoidance maneuver," the source said, adding that the likelihood of a collision had exceeded "the acceptable level."

On board the space station are two Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko and American astronaut Scott Kelly.

Internationale Raumstation ISS
NASA says ISS' operations are back to normalImage: Nasa/dpa

Normal operations resumed

The US space agency NASA later said the ISS had resumed normal operations. The fragment had - as calculated - missed the space station.

They had "stayed" in the Soyuz during the debris pass, NASA said.

Interfax said the junk was a fragment of the meteorological satellite Meteor-2 which was launched in 1979 from the Soviet-era Plesetsk cosmodrome.

ipj/ls (AFP, dpa)