Space Station Safe From Space Junk

HOUSTON, March 16, 2009— -- Commander Mike Fincke and his colleagues on the International Space Station got good news from Mission Control this evening: There is no need to dash into the Soyuz or move the space station.

The floating junk that threatened the orbiting outpost won't come near enough to cause a problem.

NASA won't have to change the orbit of the space station, which means the Space Shuttle Discovery won't have to alter its course to dock with the space base Tuesday.

NASA draws an imaginary box around the space station that sets the boundary of how close it will let debris come to the outpost before taking evasive action.

Analysts in Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center started tracking this piece of junk over the weekend -- just days after the crew was forced to close all the airlocks between the modules in the space station and take shelter in the Russian Soyuz.

Last week's alarm was noteworthy, because usually Mission Control gets more notice -- it can take 30 hours to plan to change the orbit of the space station.

Flight Director Paul Dye said he found out about the most recent threat Saturday, that the space junk, dubbed Kosmos 1275, could be targeting the space station, and it gave his team a couple of days to figure out what to do.

But knowing something is up there doesn't mean it's easy to predict where it will go.

"It is difficult to get an accurate track of where it is going, so you put [it] in the computers and it showed up as green, then yellow, then red, which is when we get worried, and then the rest of the tracks were green," Dye said.

If it seems like there is more debris threatening the space station recently, that's because there is.

It's kind of like freeway traffic, according to Dye.

"We seem to have more right now, and you wonder where it comes from, and then it is gone," he said. "It is cyclical."

Leroy Cain, chairman of the Mission Management Team, said this won't be the last time space junk threatens the space station or the space shuttle.

"Space debris is an issue for us," he said. "There are objects we have to contend with, we have to be constantly mindful. It is a random occurrence that we have had to deal with them in such a short succession."