Cape Canaveral, Fla. — The international space station and space shuttle Discovery had to dodge a menacing piece of space junk Wednesday a large tool that was fumbled by an astronaut earlier in the week.
NASA did not think the 10- to 15-pound hunk of metal would come back to haunt the 10 astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the two linked spacecraft. But it did to the embarrassment of Jim Voss, who accidentally let go of the piece during a spacewalk on Sunday.
Mission Control ordered commander James Wetherbee to fire Discovery's thrusters to move the joined spacecraft to a higher orbit. Without the maneuver, the 12-by-6-inch viselike tool would have passed a scant 200 feet beneath the complex.
A direct hit from such an object could punch a gaping hole in a spacecraft, causing immediate depressurization and killing everyone on board.
The evasive action was carried out just hours after astronaut Susan Helms moved from Discovery into space station Alpha, joining Voss and cosmonaut Yuri Usachev for a four-month stay aboard the orbiting outpost. Her switch in ships marked the completion of the first crew exchange.
"The torch is passing," said flight director John Shannon.
The evasive action marked the second time in two months that astronauts had to steer a docked shuttle and station away from orbiting trash. A piece of Russian debris would have come within 820 feet of Atlantis and Alpha in February if the pilots had not acted.
Discovery had planned to give the space station a boost in altitude anyway late Wednesday night. Shannon said the tool should drop out of orbit in about a month.
As of Wednesday, the U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., was tracking 8,303 manmade orbiting objects the size of a softball or bigger. Only 600 were functioning satellites. The rest was garbage: spent rocket bodies, old and broken satellites and chards of exploded spacecraft.
The Space Command alerts NASA hours in advance if any of these thousands of pieces is expected to cross paths with the shuttle or the station. The do-not-enter zone around the shuttle and station is, ideally, 25 miles long, 25 miles wide and six miles deep.
NASA's shuttles have had to dodge space junk 10 times through the years and the space station three times, not counting Wednesday, said a spokesman.
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