


Astronauts on the International Space Station had to take cover Wednesday when a Russian satellite fractured into pieces and created a cloud of space debris.
It’s unknown what caused the satellite to fracture, but the station was not hit.
“NASA instructed crews aboard the space station to shelter in their respective spacecraft as a standard precautionary measure after it was informed of a satellite break-up at an altitude near the station’s earlier Wednesday,” the ISS posted on X. “Mission Control continued to monitor the path of the debris, and after about an hour, the crew was cleared to exit their spacecraft and the station resumed normal operations.”
The decommissioned satellite broke into more than 100 shards and may present a risk to other spacecraft in the future.
“It’s very murky right now,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who keeps a public catalog of orbiting shrapnel in space, told the New York Times. “We don’t have a clear understanding yet,” he added, noting there is “a wide range of possibilities.”
U.S. Space Command commented on the satellite’s destruction as well, confirming it as Russian satellite RESURS-P1.
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The U.S. Space Force will work to catalog the debris shards in the coming months to help prevent unexpected collisions.
A somewhat unlikely explanation for the satellite’s fracture could be that Russia fired a missile at it as an anti-satellite missile test, which Russia and other countries, including the United States, have done before. The U.S. committed to a ban on these types of tests in 2022.