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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A diminutive piece of expanse fling drifted dangerously near to the International Space Station on Tuesday, prompting NASA to visit the threesome astronauts to essay diminution in their bespoken capsule.

Mission Control gave the visit after determining there was not sufficiency instance to cows the orbiting outpost absent from the expanse junk.

The detritus — estimated to be about 6 inches conservativist — is from a Asiatic equipment that was advisedly blasted in 2007 as conception of a weapons test. It was sticking to pass within threesome miles of the expanse station, warranting a flushed danger level, NASA's highest.

Just terminal Friday, the expanse send had to advise out of the way of an orbiting balance from a two-satellite impinging in 2009.

Debris is an increasingly serious difficulty in orbit, because of colliding and blasted spacecraft. At 5 miles a second, damage crapper be severe, modify from something individual inches big. Decompression, in fact, is at the crowning of any spacefarers' danger list.

More than 12,500 pieces of detritus are orbiting Earth — and those are the ones big sufficiency to track.

Mission Control notified the gathering of the latest danger weekday morning, a some hours after the venture was identified. The threesome gathering members are Dmitry Kondratyev, the station's Russian commander, dweller Empress Coleman and Italian Paolo Nespoli.

The itinerary of the expanse fling is extremely erratic, and there's quite a taste of atmospheric inspire on it, said NASA spokesman Josh Byerly. Experts monitored the detritus into the early afternoon, to watch its exact path.

It's possible the venture of a impinging strength diminish. If that happened, the threesome send residents would not hit to near themselves off in the Soyuz spacecraft. They arrived at the send in the Soyuz terminal December. The satellite serves as a lifeboat in housing of an emergency. It will be used at the modify of their six-month mission to deliver the gathering back to Earth in May,

But if the venture take relic red, the astronauts would hit to vanish word lines streaming from the expanse station's major modules, seal the hatches to the rooms, and switch the radio channels so they crapper rest in occurrence with grace control teams in metropolis and Moscow.

They would need to float into the Soyuz capsulise about 10 transactions in advance of the instance of closest approach — currently sticking to be 4:21 p.m. Eastern Time — and rest inside for at least 15 transactions afterward.

The terminal instance a send gathering took refuge in a Soyuz was in 2009. That time, the gathering had inferior than an hour's advance warning. This time, the astronauts had figure hours' notice.

A fresh three-person gathering is en line to the 220-mile-high outpost after rocketing absent from Kazakhstan. That Soyuz is due to come Wednesday evening.

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Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/station

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