The debris was a piece of a spent rocket motor. The 5-inch piece missed the ISS by a very small distance. Fortunately, it did not hit the space station. An impact would have had catastrophic consequences. 

 

With less than an hour’s notice, the three members of the space station - ISS Commander Mike Fincke, Russian flight engineer Yury Lonchakov and NASA's Sandra Magnus – all sought refuge in the Russian capsule at the space station. If the piece of debris would have hit the ISS, the three astronauts would have left for Earth in the Soyuz. 

 

The three ISS members fled the space stance in such a rush that they forgot to take the instruction manual with them. Luckily, the debris missed the ISS. After 10 minutes inside the Soyuz capsule, they returned into the ISS. Meanwhile, about 250 miles below, NASA officials were holding their breath. 

 

"We were watching it with bated breath," NASA space debris scientist Mark Matney said. "We didn't know what was going to happen." Matney, who has been working with NASA since 1992, said this was the closest call he can remember. 

 

ISS Commander Mike Fincke radioed to Earth after the dangerous event passed. He said they watched through the Soyuz capsule’s window but did not see the piece of debris passing by. 

 

Considering the fact that this happened just a month after an American and a Russian satellite crashed into each other on Earth’s orbit, many NASA officials may have been quite pessimistic about this event. 

 

NASA engineers said they do not know how close the chunk of debris came to the ISS, but it was really close. 

 

Let’s hope the crew of the ISS won’t forget the instruction manual the next time something like this happens because it will certainly happen again. There is a considerable amount of debris out there so there’s a high risk of collision. 

 

The amount of debris resulted from the crash of the American and Russian satellites a month ago is huge and will orbit the Earth for a very long time, even more than 10,000 years. 

 

However, the most debris-generating event so far was China’s destruction of Fengyun 1 in 11, 2007. Its destruction with a ballistic weapon resulted into a hazardous cloud of shards at altitudes ranging from 300 to 2,500 miles. The event resulted into a total of approximately 2,400 pieces of debris, plus 150,000 smaller chunks (between 1 and 5 cm).