Space junk may force space station crew to take shelter

The International Space Station The three astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) may have to take shelter inside Russian space capsules on Wednesday morning due to a piece of a Chinese weather satellite destroyed in 2007, NASA reported.A 10-cm (4-inch) piece of space junk is expected to fly perilously close to the ISS. If the calculations turn out to be true, commander Dan Burbank from NASA and Russian flight engineers Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin will have to protect themselves from a possible collision, the space.com website reported.The station crew were informed by Mission Control, at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, at 1906 GMT on Tuesday that the dangerous object looked to be on a course near the orbiting laboratory.The object may come within 850 meters (2,800 ft) of the ISS.“The tracking at that time was showing it is going to be in the danger area,” NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries told space.com, a space and astronomy website. “Since then tracking looks like it's trending to the better.”